Time to say adios to 'Troupey' our faithful Isuzu Trooper SUV

WATKINS GLEN, New York, USA - When our Toyota Tundra pickup arrived in the driveway two weeks ago (with us inside), our 1997 Isuzu Trooper probably knew its days were numbered.

With the Tundra home from Mexico, the Trooper will now be sold to someone else out looking for  adventure, we hope.

It certainly provided us with plenty.

We bought the Trooper - nicknamed Troupey - the same fall that we dragged the original Gray Goose Express traveler trailer from Pat and Sanders Lamont's house in Sacramento, through California and Arizona and down all the way to Tenacatita Bay.

Eventually, the Gray Goose Express was parked in Arroyo Seco, where it was temporary housing for Laura McCartney while she was teaching English to the village children.

Troupey served as a great go-to-the-beach vehicle as well as a family loaner. A lot of people borrowed the SUV, frequently using its 4-wheel drive function in the soft sands of Arroyo Seco.

Last summer we used Troupey a lot here at Seneca Lake, managing in the fall to get it stuck up to its axles trying to retrieve the sailing vessel Crimson Tide. Eric Hazlitt came by and pulled the entire rig from the soft sand and gravel at Fitch Beach in Valois in that episode.

Troupey will be missed, but the Tundra will take its place quite handily as the primary tow vehicle here in New York, for the various watercraft already in our fleet, and perhaps for one new one - a Windrider 17 sailboat if I can find a good deal.

Trooper and Grey Goose at Jim Carr's house in Arizona where we had to dump nearly 1,000 pounds

A trip to a wine bar where the belly dancers rule

PORT ANGELES, Washington, USA - Adm. Fox, Dustin and I headed downtown to Port Angeles tonight to a place called Wine on the Water (LINK: Wine bar) where we tried a few wines and listened to music.

Note the ladder to the left

Quite a cool evening

It wasn't the usual wine bar fare when it came to tunes - though at first there was some pop-fusion something that was giving me more of a headache than the sulfites in the vino.

The music that eventually dominated came from the adjacent room where a group of four belly dancers were putting on a show.

And the room was packed with their fans while they went through a series of quite provocative moves. (A brief video is below.)

Tomorrow our travels will take us to Canada... Still looking for my passport, though.

A town called Squim... even though it's spelled Sequim

SEQUIM, Washington, USA - Adm. Fox and I have been making far too many jokes about some of the local names around here - this town's handle for example: Sequim.

Not much rain, but the river runs fast

Even though it would seem that it would be pronounced See-Quim, it is pronounced simply Squim, like Squish but with an M at the end instead of ish.

So when you leave from here to go to the downtown you go.... Squimming, of course.

Name aside, this is a fabulous place and has only about 17 inches of precipitation per year. That's practically desert, especially for the northwest.

A half-hour's drive way, on the other side of the mountains an average 170 inches of wet stuff is the norm.

I'll stick to squimming in Sequim.

We've been taking great walks here on a trail, seeing lots of wildlife. You don't have to go far however as the deer come into the yard every night, snacking on both the bushes and any birdseed I have been foolish enough to leave out.

The nursery said the deer don't eat this bushes

Adm. Fox also made a new friend today who really wanted to get out of her enclosure and continue the walk with us.

I have a bag of lettuce to give her on our next pass by.

Another recruit for Zumba?

Our time here visiting son Dustin is almost over and we are charting a course home to New York.

We have a few more adventures planned before that, including a sojourn to Canada Saturday - Victoria, Canada to be exact, an hour-and-a-half ferry ride across the straight.

We will join up with Bahia del Sol amiga Shania who has graciously agreed to squire us around the city.

Now if I can just find my passport...

Starting to like the gray skies and light rain... Uh-oh!

PORT TOWNSEND, Washington - The gray overcast here has starting growing on me a little, kind of like the green moss I see on almost every rock and on one side of the trees.

Kee-rist, I see it's growing on the back of me, too!

Today Adm. Fox and I took a sojourn to the east to visit former CSUS colleague Paul Cahill and his wife Tamar at their five-acre estate a mile or so from downtown Port Townsend. Paul says it's a work in progress. I don't know. It looked like a fabulous place to me.

Port Townsend waterfront

And I don't know anyone else who keeps llamas in their front yard.

Port Townsend in a relatively short drive from where Dustin lives and another waterfront town. It seems to have resisted all of the big-box stores and retained a lot of charm. We bought food at a Thai restaurant, then retired to bar called the Pourhouse on the waterfront to eat it along with some excellent pale ale and cider.

Excellent!

Tomorrow we will explore Port Angeles itself and pay a courtesy call on the Peninsula Daily News newspaper (LINK: Daily News website), an 18,000 circulation publication that seems to have a good reputation with the locals here.

Port Angeles downtown

What's up with that?

No plans yet for our sojourn back to Watkins Glen and Seneca Lake... Still waiting for the all clear from the weather folks. And I just read that it snowed in Central NY. today.

What's up with that, too? 

New blogging software for iPad... let's see

SEQUIM, Washington, USA - Just a little too lazy to pull out one of the two laptops I have along, so I decided to install some new iPad software for blogging with blogspot.com.

This, as you can see, is a test to see how well it works.

If it does, well, fabulous. If it doesn't, well, just another bit of evidence in support of my recent purchase of a MacBook Air.

Now, let's see if a photo can be added.