January 2011 Trip to Hawaii

We were able to spend 10 days in Hawaii at our favorite place on the island of Maui the Kaanapli Beach Hotel.

Whale watching was one of the highlights of our trip.
The Show Off


The Mom


The two ton "baby". They get curious about the butt, I mean the boat so they stick their head up out of the water to get a better look.

WINTER QUARTERS

We made the trip from Port Susan back to Lake Pleasant, our winter quarters. Gizmo is now a prisoner of the motor home as she can not wander freely here. It's the leash or nothing and she really REALLY does not like the leash. We are in a different spot this year because we now use our satellite dish and so we are in an area with better reception. Will post a picture or two later.

I'm baaaack...

Well, I enjoyed a month or so (the only thing I count is treats) at our boat, Denita. I was happy to get back here to Port Susan however because I was concerned about the small critters getting out of control. I have been working hard to keep the population down which is something I don't have to do on the boat. Around there everything is way bigger then me.

So today I am frustrated because it is too wet outside for my little pink feet. I guess I will just have to sit it out here inside and watch the football game with the humans. Could be worse I suppose. We could be in the boat, crossing the Straits in a storm - been there, done that!

Gizmo

SOME TIME WITH DENITA

Since the motor home needed to go in to the dealer for some repairs that were going to take a couple of weeks, we moved back onboard Denita and spent some time cruising Puget Sound like old times. Now we find ourselves having second thoughts about selling her.

Sunset at Shilshole looking through the neighborhood.

Mount Ranier from Liberty Bay

The Seattle Skyline

The Dingy and the Zodiac
No, wait, I mean the Dingy and Arlyene

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While in Liberty Bay we spent a couple days with our old dock buddies Bob and Sherry Custer just before they departed on their dream trip to Mexico. Here we waive good bye and salute them with an air horn send off.

MOUNT ST. HELENS

We drove up to Mt St Helens today as a side trip from a gathering of folks who have the same brand of motor home as ours. The weather was perfect for the trip.

Like much of what we saw on our recent trip through the southwest, the scale of what happened and the resulting destruction is hard to convey in a photograph but we will try.

The picture below is best viewed by clicking on it to enlarge. The Toutle River enters the picture in the lower left corner. It is a good sized river but hardly noticable in this photo. All the rest you can see that looks like river bed is actually ash and mud flow left over from the eruption over 30 years ago.

Below you can see the Toutle River as it winds its way through the mud flow. The mountain is in the background.

In the picture below the mud flow and ash averages 150 feet thick - and yes
that is still the Toutle River running through it. This is just below the crator.

...and here is the crator as it looks today with it's slowly rebuilding dome. This is taken from the Johnston Observatory.

HOME AGAIN - PORT SUSAN

We made the trip from Cascade Locks, OR to the Tulalip Casino in good time in spite of accidents in Tacoma, Seattle, and Lynnwood on I-5. They cost us about 30-40 minutes overall. We "dry camped" here last night and had a nice dinner at a Casino restaurant. Today we will fuel up and take the coach to our lot in Port Susan and start some serious cleaning of both the coach and the truck, both are very dirty and still have a red tint to them from the fine red dust of Monument Valley and Moab. Overall we drove the coach 3500 miles and put an additional 500 on the truck doing side trips. Wherever we were we were "home". Both vehicles performed perfectly but, as expected, we shook a few things lose and the coach is going to be spending some time at the dealership getting a few things fixed. We may find ourselves living on Denita again for a few weeks. Oh Darn!

This has been in interesting spring for weather. It seems we were experiencing some kind of weather extreme almost everywhere except right here in the Pacific Northwest. We left in mild weather and came back to sunny skies. Eslewhere we had everything from high winds with gusts to 70 mph to freezing temperatures, snow and hail. One thing we did not have a lot of was rain. Having said that I must also say that every day we went out to explore we had good weather to do that. We hiked where and when we wanted to. The only thing that kept us from doing all the hikes we wanted to do was crowded parking lots with no place to park at the trail heads in Arches NP. We made up for that by going off road with the truck and finding a great hike with almost no one else around because the trail head was hard to get to withour a four wheel drive vehicle.

We enjoyed this adventure a great deal and look forward to planning our next one. This may be the last post for a while but I hope to add some pictures to this post and the last one and Arlyene is working on some video too.

WMD

PENDLETON TO CASCADE LOCKS

GREEN again!

Easy trip to Cascade Locks from Pendleton down the Columbia River gorge yesterday. It is nice to be around real trees again. After the last few weeks we can see how visitors are overwhelmed by the green of our area.

Had a "quiet" night replacing the wind with a train every now and then - a train going by about 150 yards from us. Hard to ignore. More of a problem for Arlyene then for the deaf guy. Will add some pictures later but getting on the road this morning hoping for a smooth ride through Seattle (hard to do on the washboard they call I-5) and back to Marysville where we will dry camp at the Tulalip Casino tonight. Then on to Port Susan on Sunday where the big clean up begins.