Well boys and girls; Dorothy and I have wanted to find a communication solution other than the AOL groupsite for those following our adventures aboard MV David Ellis. The AOL groupsite has been very clunky, adds weird symbols to the text narratives and I've been unable to add photos for a couple of months now. This new site was recommended to us; we've signed up and are now trying to learn our way around using it.

We are "home" in Sebastopol CA with children and grandchildren for the month of December. We flew into Vancouver BC from Hong Kong on Oasis Airlines, a new carrier out of Hong Kong. We had very inexpensive seats ($600 USD roundtrip), but the excess baggage (lots of Christmas presents) was so much that it was cheaper to upgrade to business class (where the baggage limits were more generous) than pay the excess baggage.

We spent Thanksgiving with Jim and Marcia Kreofsky (Sonoma County friends who moved to Kona about '95 and just this past year retired and moved to Whidby Island WA), then drove south with them to Sebastopol, arriving just 2 days ago.

Dorothy and I will spend December here, doing doctor and dentist appointments, visiting with friends, buying tools and parts for the boat, but most importantly spending time with our family.

We haven't been here in over a year and our grand-daughters Jordanne and Jenna have grown and (physically) changed so much in the past year as to be almost unrecognizable. Thank goodness they're still the same sweet, bright, tough, wonderful kids they've always been. Today Dorothy went to one of Jenna's soccer games -- she plays for SR United while I went to Healdsburg HS where Jordanne had a wrestling tournament. Yes folks that's w-r-e-s-t-l-i-n-g, co-ed high school wrestling. She won 1, lost 2 for the day. As a bonus, I got to see Dan Bessette, just retired from the Sheriff's Department, who was one of the officials.

So bear with me as we get the new blog up and running. I'm going to try archive the stories and photos from the old AOL site.