Happy
Holidays, everyone! Last year it
was Christmas at the L.A. airport, New Year's in the small town
plaza of
Roldanillo in Colombia, and spring equinox in South Africa. 2014
had to be one
of our best travel years ever! We left on Dec. 25 and spent a
week or so flying
paragliders with friends from the Seattle area in Roldanillo.
Four of us took
the night bus across two mountain ranges for a few days flying
near Bucaramanga
and Chicamocha Canyon National Park before packing our wings and
playing
tourist for a couple of days in the capital, Bogota. Colombia
was a truly
remarkable destination and we enjoyed our whole three weeks
there.
It seemed like
we spent most of
February preparing for our March trip to South Africa, making
sure we had all the
immunizations and meds we needed. Emirates Airlines had us
overnighting in
Dubai, and then on to Cape Town for a two-week flying adventure
that took us to
scenic soaring sites on the coasts of the Atlantic and the
Indian Oceans, inland
for some desert cross-country flying, and some urban soaring at
Lions Head,
right in Cape Town. Our guides made a point of stopping at all
sorts of interesting
scenic and cultural points along the way, including the penguin
colonies at
Betty's Cove. We'd intended to spend our last week at Victoria
Falls and Kruger
National Park, but a national holiday had all flights back to
Cape Town booked
solid. So we instead signed up for a mini-safari of three days
at Aquila game
farm, just a few hours' drive from Cape Town. It was
surprisingly fun, and
interesting, but we're still hoping to one day get to the falls
and do a real
safari. We could have spent a week touring Cape Town; we
squeezed as much as we
could into our one day in the city, and borrowed a car to go
climb the bluffs at
the Cape of Good Hope.
It took us
most of the spring to catch
up on all of the house and yard work we had put off during our
global
gallivanting. In April we finally got some flights in the NW,
our first since
October. We scored some fabulous early summer wildflower hikes
in eastern
Washington at Steamboat Rock and Moses Coulee, and picked the
perfect couple of
days for spectacularly scenic kayaking on Baker Lake. In late
June we made our
12th annual trek down to Oregon for the paragliding
Rat Race, then
came back to eastern Washington to be volunteer launch directors
for the
30-somethingth Chelan Classic. We stuck around in Chelan for the
4th
of July fireworks and the beginning of the National Paragliding
Championships
before coming home to continue harvesting our huge crop of
blueberries (our
freezer is bulging with berries!), and to stain the deck, a
regular yearly
chore it seems.
In August
George got to play his
Washington State “disabled veterans” card and claim a free
campsite at Ft.
Flagler State Park on the Olympic Peninsula. We paddled at
Flagler (saw
otters!!), hiked on Hurricane Ridge (past a big ol' goat lazing
right alongside
the trail), then on to Rialto Beach for a fog-shrouded walk in
the heart of Twilight
(the vampire novel) country.
Ginny and Wally joined us the next week; we visited with Uncle
Harry and did a
quick tour of the Tacoma Glass Museum on a rainy afternoon, then
paddled the
Enatai Slough on Lake Washington in sunshine. We had barely
waved goodbye to
them when we left for the Oregon coast to visit with C.J.’s
since-kindergarten girlfriend
Paula and her family.
Our Labor Day
adventure destination was
the Sand Turn fly-in on the edge of the Big Horn Mountains in
Wyoming. On the
way we stopped to visit and paddle Payette Lake with long-time
hang gliding
friends Davis and Belinda. After the fly-in we paddled the Big
Horn River
through its deep and narrow canyon in the surprisingly
un-populated Big Horn
Canyon National Park. Then on to Yellowstone, where we saw a
grizzly way out in
a meadow, and enjoyed a frosty, scenic paddle on Lewis Lake.
That was a lot of
driving and fun-hoggin' packed into one short week!
October is our
favorite hiking season,
and we found some blazing fall-colors trails, one up a steep
route to some
lakes behind one of our favorite mountain flying sites, that
we'd been looking
down on from the air just a few days earlier. Then it was off to
Florida for
the USHPA board meeting and a busy visit with C.J.’s brother
Rob, who
appreciated the extra pairs of hands to help with house and yard
maintenance.
Our last hike
for the season was in the
snow at Chinook Pass in November just before C.J. went in for
some minor foot
surgery to unclench the toes on the same foot as her bunion
repair two years
ago. Ginny and Wally drove up from the Bay Area to join us for
Thanksgiving; our
turkey dinner with all the fixin's was a truly traditional
family feast.
We’ve kept up
our square dancing on
most Tuesdays, and we've started advanced lessons, not that we
ever expect to
go back to challenge-level dancing. We are season subscribers to
the Issaquah
Village Theater—In the
Heights, The
Tutor, and Mary
Poppins are three
of the plays/musicals we've enjoyed so far this season. And
that’s about the
extent of our social and cultural activity outside of hang
gliding and
paragliding.
Coming up soon
is our big trip to New
Zealand for the whole month of February—summer down under. We’re
using our
WorldMark timeshares for a week at Rotorua (North Island) and
two at Wanaka
(South Island). We’re hoping to meet up with flying friends, a
flying friend's mum,
and one of C.J.'s high school friends while we are touring
around.
C.J. continues
to pick up new skills in
Photoshop as she makes digital scrapbook layouts. Those are her
photo ornaments
at the top of the page. George writes about our hikes, flights
and trips in his
travel journal at http://sturtevantg.blogspot.com. C.J.'s
scrapbook pages are on her
blog, http://sturtevantcj.blogspot.com.
We’re staying
reasonably healthy and
hope that you are, too. Best wishes for a happy holiday season
and a peaceful
and prosperous 2015!
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