Interlude: Back Online!

Sunset at the pier in Seattle, Washington. Every time we’ve visited this rainy city, the weather has been perfect.

Hey everybody!

I am too used to my prepaid phone service in New Zealand and I couldn’t ever figure out if I was roaming or not on my borrowed phone in the USA, so the whole time we were camping in Washington and then on our Alaskan cruise, I didn’t dare use the internet. Apparently roaming can be “between $2.05 and $26” per MB, so I just kept my phone in flight mode this whole time to be safe. It’s the polite thing to do when borrowing a phone from a friend, I think.

Since my last post we’ve been to both the Getty Centre and Getty Villa in Los Angeles, seen some amazing exhibits, spent time with beloved friends, enjoyed the Dale Chihuly Gardens in Seattle, and gone on a fantastic seven-day cruise through Alaska’s inside passage on the MS Westerdam. 

I cannot say enough good things about all of my experiences, so I’m going to get to editing my 8 GBs of photos and queue up some blog posts for the next few days. We’re only halfway through our vacation, so there will be much more to come!

We just got off the boat this morning, but rather than heading to bed, we went shopping to kit out for our upcoming kayaking trip and then met up with a friend who drove all the way from Portland to enjoy Pike Place Market and a beautiful Seattle sunset with us.

I have the most amazing, supportive friends and family in the entire known universe, so it’s been overwhelming to reconnect with so many of them after living so far away.

I can’t wait to share more of this with you all!

Preparing For Departure: Day 0

Saying goodbye to our beloved deck for the next month.

Hello and welcome to the blog. The last time I took a vacation greater than a month in duration, I found that it was much more difficult than I anticipated to keep all my friends and family in the loop about where I was, what I’d been doing, and where I planned to go next.

This time I decided to try something different: I’m creating a little blog to keep tabs on myself, and maybe other interested parties can use it to keep tabs on me as well. Please note that by interested parties I hopefully mean my friends and family both in NZ and the US. Not foreign governments or anything like that.

We’ll be starting things off with an eight hour bus trip from Queenstown to Christchurch.

Given that Morghan and I are both recovering from the pretty horrendous flu, there may or may not be much substance to the next few updates.

I’m also looking for a new place to dump photos and will let you all know where that ends up being. Flickr’s new interface is so terrible that I can’t even be bothered to try to figure out how to use it, so on to brighter pastures, I suppose. In the meantime, if you have the app and feel like following along at home, feel free to stalk me on Instagram at @CaseyDownUnder.