S/V Adventurer

Well, it's official. We have been traveling for one whole year. We left Seattle and headed North up the inside passage on our sailboat into the great unknown on May 31, 2014 and now that it is May 31, 2015, my meager math skills tell me that means that 525,949 minutes have passed since we left. If your meager math skills are having a hard time deciphering what 525,949 minutes is, it's one year, or 31,556,940 seconds. Try to keep up. Any way you look at it, it's been the best year of our lives. I can't adequately describe with words the amount of fun that we've had. We've seen more amazing things than we even knew existed, we've done more things than we knew were possible, and we've hiked more miles than my barking dogs would have liked (feet = ouch). The best part of all is the fact that tomorrow will be day number one of year number two, and we have no end in sight. I don't have a whole lot to report at the moment, mostly becau...

For the last couple of weeks, I've had a pretty tough time sleeping and I couldn't figure out why. Since leaving Bend about a month and a half ago, we've stepped up our exploring game and been putting some serious miles on our feet so my sleeping problem wasn't for a lack of exercise. We've been exhausted on a daily basis so falling asleep has been pretty easy. But for some reason, at 3am, every morning for the last couple of weeks I've been waking up...and once I am awake, I'm awake. At first I thought that I might be stressed out about something and that was keeping me up. It turns out that since quitting work over a year ago (yes, it's been over a year...woo hoo!!!), I don't really have any stress. The biggest source of stress that we have is figuring out what we are going to do tomorrow and to be honest, as much as I might cry about it, that just isn't very stressful. My next thought was that since we changed climates when...

We were walking around the little town of Florence Oregon this morning looking for a souvenir. We noticed the other day that we haven't really purchased any souvenirs on this trip other than a t-shirt that I got in Montana at the Lewis and Clark Caverns. It was actually a pretty funny shirt that said “bears love people...they taste like chicken” with a picture of a bear chasing a couple of hikers. It was a very fitting shirt because we had been actively searching for bears for about 4 months at that point and had only seen one...and we were in the heart of bear country for the entire 4 months of our search. Now that we have had what could be the world record for close encounters with bears last week (13 bears in 3 days), my t-shirt souvenir doesn't seem so funny anymore. We are seriously hoping to not see anymore bears for a while. Anyway, we just couldn't seem to find anything that suited us at the little nick-nack shops that lined the streets of Florence. There ju...

We've had a pretty busy week or so since I last put something out there. After our little stay in Pinnacles National Park, which holds the record as our shortest stay at a National Park with less than 24 hours (we hiked every inch of it in one day and there was nothing left to see, so it was time to move on...really an amazing place), we decided that we should head to the coast for some beach time and some city time. The first stop was in Santa Cruz. This has long been one of my favorite surfing destinations on the west coast. I have made a handful of pilgrimages here over the years and it has consistently had the best and cleanest waves that I have ever seen anywhere. Unfortunately, my luck had run out on good waves. The surf was big and it was rough. But since we came all this way, I of course had to give it a shot. I paddled out into the big and rough surf and after about 5 minutes, realized that I am not as young and tough as I used to be. After a quick beating...

You may have noticed that we have spent a lot of time in the Great Outdoors on this little adventure. If you haven't noticed, you probably haven't been paying much attention. We love Mother Nature, our National Parks, and any kind of natural wonder that we can sink our teeth into. There is one thing that all of these things have in common...they take human powered propulsion to see them...in other words, a lot of hiking. You may be surprised to hear that I don't really care to hike. You may not be surprised to hear that Brenda loves to hike. It is actually her favorite activity on Earth (other than spending time with me...24/7...just the 2 of us in an itty-bitty home on wheels...she loves it). I should clarify that my dislike of hiking is really an exaggeration. I love being outdoors and I love to see what is at the end of the hike. You know, the big finale. But sometimes it takes miles and miles of hiking to see some of this stuff and sometimes after miles...

The last time we spoke, we were in Yosemite National Park. Well, we've left Yosemite, but we did spend a week in the park and had a great time during our little visit. While we were there, we hiked almost 70 miles of trails, saw some amazing waterfalls, and some even more amazing rock formations. The place is grand, spectacular, incredible...you get the picture. We only had 5 days of activity in the park due to some thunderstorms on one day and a surprise snow storm that left 6-8” of white stuff and basically left us stranded on another day... which gave a couple of days of rest that were much appreciated by me. And yes, rest is a relative term. On our days of rest, we still hiked 6-7 miles (which seems like child's play after 15 miles the day before), took care of laundry and grocery shopping, and explored the local towns. Really, there is nothing super exciting to report about our stay there, other than we loved it. If you have never been to Yosemite, all that I ...