Five Happy Things: Whales, Plus Alaska!

  

Here are five things that have recently made me smile, laugh, or sigh in contentment. The hope is that by keeping track of and sharing them here, I will continue to focus on the good things in life, of which there are so, so many, even if its metaphorically storming elsewhere..

So here are this week's Five Happy Things . . . 

1.  Granddaughters And Visits.  My husband is currently on the east coast with my daughter and granddaughters, helping out with the girls while my daughter gets the house ready to be placed on the market. She and my son-in-law will be relocating to Germany in the spring as part of his next naval assignment, but currently my son-in-law is at sea so she has much appreciated the presence of her dad to lend a hand during a very stressful time. We are FaceTiming multiple times a day currently, and I smile each time at how cute the girls are, and how both exhilarated and exhausted my husband is . . . we are our granddaughters favorite 'toys' and without me there to share the load, he's wiped! 😄

Anyhow, he and my oldest granddaughter will depart the east coast for California today, and I'm so excited to pick them both up from the airport tonight. She'll be here for a week, then she and I fly back together to the east coast so that I can then lend a hand to my daughter, while also getting to spend time with my youngest, two and 1/2 year old granddaughter.

2.  Sunshine and 70's Weather In Winter.  I do not particularly enjoy being alone for long stretches of time, so knowing that my husband would be gone for five days, I made a series of dates with girlfriends to do outdoor activities like hiking, biking, and kayaking. The weather, most fortunately, has been glorious this week, and it's been much appreciated.

Cocktails at the beach with my gal pal Wendy, after a long beach walk this past Friday.

3.  Gray Whale Migration Season.  It's gray whale migration season here, which roughly runs from December - March, and this weekend is our annual Whale Festival, tampered down significantly due to COVID, of course. Still, there will be much going on at our harbor, and one of the activities I've signed up for is an adult-child marine art lesson and whale watching tour to do with my granddaughter.

I've done a good number of whale watching tours, and they are always fun, but this will be my six year old granddaughter's first time and she is beyond excited.

4.  Retiring Friends.  My husband and I retired quite early - I was 48 and he was 56 - but now that we're ten years into retirement, many of our long time friends are entering their 60's and thus beginning to join us. One of my best friends just announced that she will be retiring on April 1, and another close friend will be hanging it up this summer and wants to start RV'ing together. As an extrovert, this makes me sooo happy!

5.  RV Caravan Tours.  Nearby friends recently purchased a motorhome, and as a result of their doing research on where to go, and how, told us they were thinking of joining up with an RV caravan tour to visit Alaska. Which has been a state my husband and I have long wanted to RV around after seeing just snippets of the state's incredible natural beauty during two previous ship cruises. So I asked her for more information, she gave me an extra brochure she had on hand, and I was off to the races. The various trips into and around Alaska via western Canada look amazing! 

Most of the trips run between 50-60 days, plus we'd need to add in additional two - four weeks to get to the starting points and back (Seattle, WA or Coeur d'Alene, ID, depending), so about three months in total. In that we are hoping to be in Germany next summer visiting my daughter, plus doing our delayed walk across Spain, we are eyeing the summer of 2023 to do this trip.

In the interim, however, there is a shorter two week caravan down to Baja Mexico to visit the gray whales that birth there each winter that we are eyeing to do in early 2022. These tours all begin at the California/Mexico border, which is just 90 minutes south of where we live, so we are thinking it would be a great introduction to RV touring in order to see if we like it, before committing to the much longer Alaska tour.

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That's it for me at the moment. What's making you happy this week?