I think I have my route is determined!

After a lot of going back and forth, mainly in my mind, but some on logistics, I’ll leave here in San Diego at the end of this coming week.

With a possible stop in Sherman Oaks to pick up my new glasses, I will head up to Chelan to spend a few days with Janet and Pat and then go to Kalispell on the Friday. On the following Monday, it will be west to Port Townsend to Jim and Mardelle. At the end of July, a house sit in Seattle, back to Port Townsend for a few days before heading south to meet up with sister-in-law Debbie. After that, it’s about 6 weeks before I head very south down to South Africa.

I’ll be putting some miles down! But my car is perfect for the trip. Lucy gets good mileage, is easy to drive and not a gas guzzler. It would be fun to have someone else on the road trip with me but that’s not happening. So will get some audio books and pod casts to keep me entertained.

A daunting part of this whole moving process has been the thought of selling Lucy but Ryan and I decided it would be best to keep her because of all her attributes. So one less thing I need to do.

And now I am starting to decide on what clothes I save and what I discard. What I am going to need and what is just superfluous. I’ve been pretty good about not getting a lot of stuff, but despite that, I seem to have accumulated more than I need. I mean, really! How many pairs of jeans do I really need?

I’ll be going from summer here in California to summer in Durban, which means only lightweight things. I could ship some stuff over for the colder months, and hope they get there! The South African postal service is not known as being terribly reliable. At the moment, I have everything laid out on the bed and there are things I haven’t worn for ages, so those will be the first discards. It might take me a few days to really whittle it down, but I need to get it down to manageable.

Griffith Observatory

At the beginning of this week, I went up to LA so had a chance to spend some time with Ryan, which is always such a pleasure. He suggested going to Griffith Observatory to watch the sunset and go on a nature walk with one of the Park rangers. We had no idea what a popular event the walk is. And we thought we had plenty of time but when we got there, there was a traffic jam and all the parking lots were full! The Observatory is way up on top of the mountain, so we wended our way back down and found a parking place more than a mile away, and called for an Uber! There was one close by so we made it back up the hill and only missed a few minutes of the talk!

We did catch the sunset, which was all the more spectacular due to the ubiquitous LA smog!

As we walked back down to the car, I was very glad we had Uber’d up, as it was a very steep walk in the dark.

Whale Watching

On Monday, Georgia, her sister-in-law Mary Ann, who is visiting from Maryland, and I are going out whale watching on the classic America. This is the same boat we went out on for Bobby’s memorial . It will be bitter-sweet for both of them. But a wonderful way of remembering that day and all the friends who came out to celebrate him.