Always Onward Adventures

We did our first day sail to a destination this weekend on the new boat. Our neightbors in the marina infomed us that this was a fun day trip - go for ice cream in Bainbridge. This sounded like a lot of fun, so with my parents in town we headed off in search of some wind to get us across the sound. We really were… (I say this alot in my day-to-day, thought it was a fun name for a boat)

We got a boat! About 5 years ago, Angela got me an engraved magifying Chart viewer (a magnifying glass that’s meant to sit right on the chart) that said “Onward 2022” - which was meant to represent the name of our future sailboat and the year we were planning to get it. Well, after 5 years of hard work we have achieved the goal set out and we are now the proud owners of a 2007 Catalina 34 sailboat.

After sailing in the Bahamas back in 2016, I have been hankering to go back. The combination of sailing, snorkeling, and warm weather was hard to beat. So for my 40th birthday I enlisted Angela to put together a similiar trip for Derek & Diane and us. With that, the trip to the BVIs was born and, after more than 6 months of planning, we headed out to the BVIs in early July 2022.

Every time we drive down I-90 going into eastern Washington we pass a large bridge with a big sign saying “Palouse to Cascade state park trail”. Ever since I first saw it, I’ve had my eye on the Palouse to Cascade state park trail as an amazing adventure to do some day. Bit of background - It’s a 289 mile trail (350-ish including detours) starting in Cedar Falls near North Bend and going all the way to Treskow on the border of Idaho.

Back to back trips! After heading to Utah with the family back in April, Angela has been hankering to get a dutch oven. After some research, she finally found one, ordered it, waited two weeks, and it arrived! We just went camping the weekend before, but you should never let the sun set on a new piece of gear - so off we went. We decided to head back to Whidbey given the fun weekend we had last time.

We kicked off our first backpacking trip of the season this weekend - the forcast was for rain so we decided to embrace it and head out to the rainforest. We had done the Bogachiel river rainforest last year, so we opted for the Hoh river rainforest this year. We were destined for rain, but we had all the right gear so we were ready… :) But first, we headed out on a Friday afternoon and stopped for dinner on our way to the trip.

Bryce canyon was our second national park of the Utah national parks trip. The park was much smaller than I was used to, but there were still plenty of things to see/do. Bryce is a hikers national park (vs canyoneering at Zion) and most of the things you want to visit are day hikes (although some of them can be quite long for a day hike). There was only one trail that we didn’t do (or at least not all of it) out of the the list of the top hikes in the park.

Welcome to Zion! When we had our Galapagos plans fall through, we decided to meet up with the family in Utah for a National park trip - starting with Zion National park. We only spent 3 days here, but we did get a good taste of the park through some canyoneering and biking. Zion is known for Canyoneering - which is where you climb up/down steep walled canyons often by walking through/in the water.