It’s Fall (or is it Spring?)

Yea, I know it’s been a long time since any serious blogging has been accomplished on this side. So I thought I’d start out with a graceful picture of yours-truly enjoying an early fall SUP (Standup Paddleboard) in the Bay of Islands, NZ.

The thing I like about SUPing is lets me get a good audience for bad humor.

We enjoyed some great hikes while crusing NZ this season. A Maori grave yard over-looking the Bay of Islands…

…with Georgia parked all by herself under the cliffs.

March was the end of our New Zealand cruising for the season. We headed back south to Hatea River and Whangarei and got a slew of boat projects done at Riverside Drive Marina. Then it was off for a quick trip to the US of A. First stop was a long weekend at Chris’ Mom’s in Carlsbad (CA), with celebration of a big six-oh while there.
Then we headed up to Bellingham for a very important grandkid fix.

We hit the Skagit Valley at the peak of the Tulip season. Tulip production started here in the early 1900’s funded by the US Dept. of Agriculture with 15,000 bulbs imported from Holland – government subsidies at work. This pic is of the angel queen of the Tulip Festival – Queen Quinn of Ferndale.

Quinn is complaining to gramps here about having to look at flowers when there is great rusty stuff just behind them – an old tulip planter.

A color coordinated trio if I ever saw one!

Teaching the young to violate the no flower or petal picking policies.

Besides tiptoeing through the tulips while we were in Bellingham we caught up on some medical appointments. Updating your Advanced Medical Directives is a good thing occasionally. Some of the questions on the form were new to me, like the one above: In the event that you stop breathing or your heart stops beating and Donald Trump is President, would you want us to resuscitate you? This cartoon was sent to me from an anonymous medical officer off one of the Pacific cruising boats.

After a long flight from Vancouver to Auckland on Air New Zealand (really good airline), we are now getting ready to make our passage from New Zealand to Fiji. Here I am removing all the unneeded  packaging from my tea bags, while this might seem like reducing the footprint in the islands we go to, I like to think of it more as increasing our footprint while we are in a marina.


Now you might have figured I’d end this blog with some gratuitous pictures of our above average grandkid – but no, just some more flower pictures. 
Paul