Back and forth

Most of the delays in posting have been due to travel lately... not on the high seas, but more mundane excursions by car and bus and rail, with not a little walking thrown in for spice. Once we got back to the boat, there was, of course, work to be done... and that's what we've been doing, up through today, and now I feel like I can take a little breather and get back on course. Until next week, of course.

We're in Vancouver, still or again, depending on how you look at it, anchored out in False Creek. Mandy is back from a trip to Wisconsin to visit family, and I am back from Washington from a separate trip for similar reasons. I went backpacking in the North Cascades (after a short delay due to a brushfire burning across I-90; though frustrating, at least it came with an air show in the form of a helicopter making water drops from a nearby stream), which is a whole different sort of wilderness than the one we have been experiencing up here. A lot more work required, too! The mountains may be best viewed from a great distance.

The spot we ended up in in the Creek isn't as advantageous as the one in which I spent the few days after sending Mandy south. It's not as convenient to shopping, nor Internet, nor a dinghy dock. It's still quite lovely, but options are limited; in the last hurrah before fall, boats abound and False Creek is crowded. We had a couple days in relative seclusion, though the best spots were full up. Now we're a little wedged in by other boats. But we'll be here for a while, at least another week, so perhaps it will clear out again after the weekend. On the other hand, next weekend is Labor Day... so maybe not.

This weekend, we have some friends coming up for a visit, which should be fun even though the weather is taking a turn for the worse. We've been bound to the bus and train while exploring up here so this will be an opportunity to get further off the beaten path and see some things we might not otherwise.

Not that the transit system up here is shoddy in any way. We figured out yesterday how to get out to go shopping in a place much cheaper than the downtown core, and even with a couple of transfers in between, it only took a couple hours. With buses every 15 minutes and trains every 5 on the main lines, you're never waiting around for very long. It very much points to how limited the options (and the thinking) are in the Seattle area, where your best bet is usually to take a car and sit in traffic. There certainly is traffic here, but it seems to be less a problem, and with such flexible transit you're not really forced into driving as much.

Despite the weather, it's still pretty nice here, and I am looking forward to a little more exploring and a little less scrambling around next week. At the end of the week, though, we're southbound by land once again, Mandy for business and me for a convention (not business). While it's all for fun, all the bouncing around is starting to get to me a little bit and I'll be glad when it is all done, September has come, and we are solidly back aboard once again. Leaving the boat is a little nerve-wracking, as is coming back and getting adjusted to it once again after any length of time on dry land. There are rewards, of course: moonrise and moonset on the day we got back:





Although we have also had the occasional uninvited guest, who has left unwanted gifts in the dinghy as it floats along off our stern.

At any rate, September may bring cooler weather, but it will also have fewer crowds, less pressing travel demands, the possibility of televised football, and the promise of a return to familiar circumstances and what seems, despite our best efforts, to most resemble real life.