Greetings from the Maldives. We are on an 11 day liveaboard scuba trip, one we’ve been hoping to do for years. We’ve been seeing mantas, lots of sharks, guitarfish, turtles, pipefish and all of the usual reef suspects like eels and octopus and a wide variety of fish. We were worried that the weather wouldn’t be good but so far it’s been really good. We like the ship, crew and the divers. We’re a group of 18 and everyone has good experience which makes our dives enjoyable. We’ll have a lot of pics to sort through. The plankton draws the mantas in which makes the vis not as good as other months but we wanted to see more big stuff.
It’s been awhile since I wrote and so much has happened. We enjoyed our time in Lithuania although of course it doesn’t have the wow of places like Patagonia. We actually did a lot of biking there- well one day we biked just across the border into Latvia on a 35km circular bike route that went around a lake in a national park. On the backside of the lake, there was an old cold war missile site with a museum where you could go down into the old missile silos. We did this in I think it was New Mexico and it was interesting to do one on the other side so to speak. We’re so glad the world didn’t end during the cold war and everyone kept their heads.
We did another bike ride in Lithuania in another park which was just OK but we did meet a nice German couple in the campground we stayed at- Manfred & Kersten and when we left she gave us two cute little painted rocks, one for hope and one for freedom. These actually ring true for me now.
We explored the city of Klaipeda and took a little ferry across to the Curonian Spit national park where you can bike to your hearts content on nice island bike paths with no cars. The last part of the spit is a border with Kaliningrad which belongs to Russia. It is their Baltic Sea access point. We didn’t cross of course. The little ferry was so well organized and we could camp right in the parking lot around all the big cranes for the port.
We took a 30 hour ferry from Klaipeda, Lithuania to Germany which saved us a lot of time driving through Poland and a lot of money in fuel. When we drove onboard we took a narrow lane up to the open deck and were sandwiched between tractor trailers outside, right at the edge of the rail. It was pretty funny trying to get in and out of the truck from that position. It was a pretty boring ferry given it was mostly for truckers but we passed the time anyway.
When we arrived in Germany, we were headed direct to Sandie & Karsten’s town to meet up with them and Mark & Liesbet, who are building out a new overland truck and doing some projects there. Meanwhile, we needed to do some maintenance on our own truck and get it ready to store because our visas were almost up and it was time to head to Paris to store it.
Just like the boatyard, its always nice to do work with friends around. We got a lot done and each evening, we made nice dinners or went out for pizza just enjoying each other’s company and working side by side. We also took a nice bike ride with Sandie & Karsten which of course included some ice cream!
While our plan to buy an airplane was sort of sidetracked last year with the seller backing out, Jon has been searching hard to find another one to put this dream into motion for us. We started up with online ground school for the 3rd time hoping that indeed, the 3rd time would be the charm. It was once again, months of looking and another sale falling through after we paid for a pre-buy, but then the right one popped up which was ironically one Jon was already in contact about last year but the seller wasn’t quite ready to let it go yet. But this time he was and the pre-buy went well and we bought the plane! It is a 2013 Glastar experimental that is known to be a very capable plane and good in the backcountry which is what we are most excited to do with it. It feels good to have a nice rapport with the David, the previous owner and we’re excited to meet him in person. It almost doesn’t feel real yet because as we do so many things in our lives, we have made the purchase from afar. There have been a lot of logistics and Jon has worked very hard to sort through them but things are falling into place and we’re hoping to start flight lessons this Fall in our own plane. We’re getting smarter by the day studying and hope that this will be just one more thing that we can experience in this life.
Meanwhile, we said goodbye to our friends for now and headed towards Paris via Luxembourg because it was on the way and we wanted to see it. We stayed at a campground outside the city and took a free bus into the city to tour it for a day. All of the transportation in Luxembourg is free. We toured the old casemates which have a lot of tunnels, the park gardens with all the lovely flowers and saw the city from the different levels of the old fort walls. It was a nice day overall.
Then it was time to drive to France and pick up a rental car for the last 2 nights. The traffic around the airport was insane. We stayed at a nice aire (French towns provide nice parking up spots for campers) where we could run and walk while getting ready. We focused on last minute details and closing up the truck for a few months while we go to do some diving, see a couple of other new places that we’ve had on our want to go list for quite some time now, and then fly back to the US to spend some time with our family and learn to fly.
