Log 30-  May 2nd  to Dec 14th 2005

Another trip back to North America, or what we did on our summer vacation.
 Distance travelled: not relevant (0 nautical miles).
 

Whenever we leave the boat for any length of time, it's always with mixed emotions. Though our last season had been full of new adventures, this time it felt particularly good to be away from the boat. It had been 16 months since our last break from cruising and we were looking forward to renewing friendships and seeing our family again. We don't believe 16 months at a time on the boat is too long, and we had really enjoyed ourselves in that time. But we'd sailed 8,400 miles, mostly to weather, so it was hard work much of the time. We had made several inland trips which helped relieve time aboard.  But apart from the reluctance to leave BREILA where we couldn't monitor her, we were looking forward to this break. One of the reasons is that we can turn off the total responsibility mindset. When travelling by air, we are now in someone else's capable hands. There's little for us to worry about. We're no longer concerned about finding a safe anchorage for the night, without the worry that we may have to get up in the middle of the night and move to a safer spot if the wind changes. We don't have to monitor the weather and forecasts as closely and rigidly. And for a while, we're off the hook for the continual maintenance and upkeep that cruising requires. So all in all it is nice to take these "vacations" from cruising.

During our first two years in Mexico, which we call "cruising 101", we followed the six-months-on, six-months-off plan. So did most cruisers we met there. There are a lot of advantages to this, since it provides a chance to keep in touch with the folks back home. Some people even work for half the year, cruise for the other half. Also it allows people who are very involved in the lives of their kids, grandkids or even aging parents, to stay in touch. Additionally, during hurricane season in Mexico (mid-June to mid-November), most insurers require your boat to be in the far north of the Sea of Cortez, which is really hot - even scary hot - at that time. So it's a great time to lock up the boat in a safe place and head north for the summer.  For many, it is the perfect happy medium. But we thought we would see the end of that once we left Mexico and sailed south. We were surprised that of the 15 cruising boats we met in Chile, nearly all followed the half-year plan. We see why. The change in focus for awhile is really healthy.

So we flew north to catch up with our son and friends in the Pacific Northwest. Before leaving Chile we had sent an email to friends and family offering our services to "house sit" if they were going away. It wasn't two hours before we received responses from friends offering us either accommodation or house sitting opportunities. One couple was going to Europe for six weeks, and the timing was perfect for us to house-sit. Cath was especially keen, as she had been missing the chance to garden. Our friends have a particularly large garden, as well as two lovely dogs for company. As soon as we returned home Mike was offered his old summer job at West Marine so all was set for a great summer holiday. It's fun for Mike to go to work at West Marine. He enjoys his colleagues there, and most of the customers are really great. He also gets to interact with other cruisers as they come home to recharge their batteries for the next season. And he learns, often directly from the manufacturers, about the latest technology. And the employee discount encourages us to load up on lots of shiny new gear.

What we did underestimate was how much time our friends put into looking after their 2-acre property which included a small vineyard. Mike would come home from West Marine and spend a couple of hours in the vineyard just keeping the vines in order as it was at the height of their growing season. Of course it rains in the Pacific Northwest even in the summer time, so a couple of times a week we had to spend 4 hours riding a lawn mower keeping the grass looking reasonable. All in all it was a great experience for us, with two distinct dark spots. One day, when Catharine was driving home from shopping, a car hit her from behind at 90 km/hr. Luckily Cath suffered only a 5 cm scalp laceration and severe bruising. The car, however, was a complete write-off - and it belonged to our friends for whom we were house-sitting. We also had an agricultural disaster. After all the work trimming, spraying etc in the vineyard, the last week before our friends returned turned damper than we realized, the vineyard developed mildew and all had to be cut back to the main stems, all the beautiful fruit was lost. We felt terrible about it, though apparently many vineyards in the Northwest got hit as well and many lost fruit. We're sure our friends won't be leaving their home to house-sitters again any time soon!

Just one week after the car accident, Catharine developed a high fever and severe abdominal pain, so we returned her to the hospital. She required an emergency hysterectomy, unrelated to the accident, however. We think we're a whole lot safer at sea, it's hard to get rear-ended at 90km/hr on a sailboat. But we were grateful to be close to good medical attention during Cath's ordeal, and not trying to live aboard the boat during her month-long recovery. Mike was quite busy working full time at West Marine, and then managing things on the home front while Cath was hospitalized. We're often asked about the dangers of cruising - pirates, storms, etc. - but we have found life at sea is MUCH safer for us!

One of the events we were looking forward to on our return was helping our friends, Kurt and Joanie, with their daughters' double wedding in Sequim, Washington. We offered to help organize, and be there on the day, so that the parents of the brides could enjoy the event without attending to details. We arrived the day before the wedding to a house full of friends and family from both sides of the country. The family was housed in nearby hotels, their brothers house across the road and friends homes close by. We were offered accommodation at a neighbor's house across the lane. There we met Jeremy and his lovely girlfriend and daughter. They treated us like royalty and we really enjoyed their friendship and hospitality. The weddings were held at a friend's fruit farm close by. It was a great day, the weather was almost too warm and everything went perfectly. 

We'd kept in touch with Mike's colleagues whom he worked with before going cruising. They had gone on to create their own construction company which had been steadily busy during the past 3 years. The construction business is particularly cyclical and if you can weather the lean times you can do well when times are good. We were approached to see if we would be interested to take on a small contract for them. The project required a "Project Engineer" as well as the Superintendent and it was 800 kms from their office. They would require a team that could basically look after themselves. They bid the work and after a short negotiation phase, they got back to us and asked us to head off to northern Idaho. The locale wasn't as glamorous as the first job we discussed (at the sugar mill in Maui) but we were looking forward to the 10 week project. Cath drove our car filled with our possessions and Mike drove a 1/2-ton pick up truck loaded with tools.

We had a great clear dry day for the drive up the Columbia River Valley to the "Tri Cities" area, and on to Spokane, a route we'd taken on our cross-country motorcycle tour 2 years ago. It was now the beginning of September, still a beautiful late summer in the mountains. We crossed the pass into the Silver Valley, the area that would be our home for the next 10 weeks. At the western end of the valley we were surrounded by a wide river valley covered in streams and deltas, perfect moose country. The grass in the marshes was tall and bent to the ever present breezes. As we travelled another 60 km east the valley narrowed, with high mountains on both sides. Mike's project was at the Lucky Friday mine, one of the last fully operational silver mines in the valley. Fifty years before, the valley had been an industrial wasteland, covered in slag piles from the mines and always dark from the belching stacks of the smelters. The Silver Valley produced lead, zinc and silver in amazing quantities, though lately the area has suffered economically due to the closure of most of the mines. Three are still operational to some degree. The small towns along the valley have had to come to grips with the loss of the big employers. Some are making a comeback, some are nearly ghost-towns. We rented a small house in the town of Kellogg, once a bustling mining town of 25,000 people, now the city signs says 2,800. Kellogg is home the largest mine in the valley, the Bunker Hill galena mine, discovered by a prospector named Noah Kellogg, The story goes that his burro got away one night and when he found it in the morning, it was standing on top of a galena outcrop. (Galena is the mineral from which lead is derived, and normally where there's lead, there's silver.) There was some argument as to who discovered the mine, was it Kellogg or the ass? The courts decided it was the ass. This meant that the two businessmen who "grubstaked" Kellogg were entitled to the mining rights. Kellogg made lots of money from the deal, but he still died a pauper, having spent more than he made. Now Kellogg bills itself as the town that was founded by a jackass. It's now also home to the Silver Valley Ski Resort, with the longest continuous gondola in the US, which ran practically over our house - a sure sign that we could expect to see snow.

Mike's project was in Mullen, an even smaller town, another 40 km east of Kellogg, almost on the border with Montana. The Lucky Friday mine has been in operation in its present form since the mid 70's. Through careful management and diversity in mines in other parts of the country and the world, they have managed to keep operating through the tough 80's and early 90's. The upgrade to their process equipment was the first capital investment of this size and extremely important to their livelihood. Both the operators of the mine and the company Mike was working for worked hard to make sure it was a success.

But it wasn't all work and no play. Even though Mike worked 50-60 hours a week, we took time to explore the local countryside. We hadn't travelled much in Idaho or Montana and we were keen to see as much as we could in the short time we were there. We arranged several weekend road trips into Montana, and back into Idaho, loops that took us through incredible country. We would put 1000 to 1600 km on the car on each of these trips, a long way in two days, but the only way for us to see the diversity of the country. We travelled through small cities like Missoula, headed south to small ex-mining towns like Philipsburg and across the border back into Idaho. The weather changes quickly at that time of the year and on our first road trip to Montana at the end of September we had snow overnight. Travelling north we took many of the scenic highways making our way back to Kellogg on the Sunday evenings. Our longest trip took us back along the same basic route in Montana but we kept heading south through the now almost deserted mining town of Anaconda (now the site of the tallest brick structure in the country, the stack from the old smelter, an historic landmark.) We crossed the continental divide at 2500 mts and drove very carefully through the snow. As we crossed back into Idaho we entered the Salmon River area. We were both astounded at the natural beauty of the mountains and the rivers. It is easy to see why people love living in Idaho.

We made some great new friends, and had the opportunity to meet many friendly people during our brief stay in the "Inland Empire". Most folks we met in the small valley towns were good honest working people, but occasionally we'd find a whiff of "red neck" or even racist mentality. It's not prevalent but still there occasionally, which surprised and saddened us when we encountered it.

We were impressed with the many rails-to-trails projects in the area. For over a 100 years there was a railway that ran the length of the valley from the Montana border west, ending up over 120 miles away on the banks of the Columbia river in Washington State. The line was used to ship goods for the mines in, and ore out, so that it could be loaded on barges and taken down river to smelters. Over the course of time, the ground beneath the rail lines became saturated in base metals, mostly lead and zinc. To dig this all out would have been an incredible cost. It was decided to remove all the rails and ties, then add new gravel and finally an asphalt cap. The whole line is now a bicycle path, connecting all the old mining towns. It's pretty much all downhill from the Montana border to the Columbia river. Small businesses have sprouted along the route to serve the thousands of people who use this path during the summer months. The Silver Valley Trail has many off shoots, small connector lines that go off into the valleys. All of this has created a destination vacation for anyone who wants easy safe recreational biking.

The Silver Valley Trail ran practically through our front yard, but we never did get around to biking the whole thing. One trail we did ride was the Route of the Hiawatha. It's another rail road that has been converted to a bike trail, though this one was not an environmental clean up project. Local governments got together to convert a stretch of what was once the rail line from Chicago, Illinois to Tacoma, Washington. It was a freight service line for many years and commandeered as a primary east/west link during the second world war. It was the first long distance rail service to run on electricity, generated in the mountains by hydro power. They also ran huge diesel engines that had been built to ship to Russia after the war. When the war ended and it appeared that Russia was no longer an ally, these were put into service on the line. They were fantastic on the trip from Chicago to the Rocky Mountains, but they couldn't handle the tight curves in the mountains. One of the favorite trips of easterners was a trip on the Hiawatha passenger service to the West coast. It was a luxurious rail service in the same class as the great trains of Europe. The section from the Montana border into Idaho is now a recreational bike trail, not paved, but well graded gravel. Of course, the 25km trip is all down hill or flat. There are many tunnels (the longest at the beginning of the ride is 1.7 km long) and old trestles on the route and you ride into a part of the wilderness that is not easily accessible without major hiking. Great informational signage along the way outlines how the railroad was built and operated. There is a shuttle service to return bikers to the trailhead. The day we rode this trail we were blessed with a cool day, the occasional very light shower and mostly sunny skies. It was also the last day the trail would be open. It's closed during hunting season, as it is unsafe to be in the woods then, even riding with florescent colored jackets on!

The project in Idaho was to finish in mid-November, so we scheduled two trips to shoe-horn in before we'd return to Chile. One was to see Cath's folks in eastern Canada. And we also planned a fun vacation to Las Vegas with our pals Kurt and Joanie. As the project went on longer than planned, Cath took the trip back to Ontario on her own and Mike stayed in Idaho and worked. It was a whirlwind trip for Cath, a week in total including travel. She got caught up with her Mom and Dad and visit her sister and nephews. One highlight for Cath was to visit our dog Rosie. We still call her "our" dog even though she now lives with Cath's sister and is pampered by her nephews. It was a week to visit aunts and uncles and generally rush around Ontario. When Cath returned we got ready to pack up, only to find that there would be another delay at the mine and even our Las Vegas trip which had been booked months before was now in jeopardy. As it as was we took the trip to Vegas and Mike missed the first 2 days of the "shutdown" for tying in the new equipment. But it was worth it as we had a blast in Las Vegas, and even got out to tour the desert in the Red Rocks park. It really re-charged our batteries.

We really enjoyed our time in the Idaho Panhandle. We watched as late summer turned to autumn and autumn became winter before we left in early December. We had agreed to stay on for another couple of weeks to manage a critical tie-in process at the mine, which meant we would be tight for time getting back to Chile. Twice we rebooked our flights back to Santiago, and in the end we took the last two seats available before Christmas. By the time we left, the yard at the mine was under 60cm of snow. We drove out of the silver valley with snow chains on the tires of the car and the truck. It was great for us to experience the three seasons in just three months.

Back in Vancouver Washington, we had three days prior to flying out. In a mad rush, we packed everything, had last get togethers with friends, and drove our car to Kurt and Joanie's in Sequim, northern Washington, as they had kindly offered to look after Mike's new toy for the next year or two. We finally go on our flight with nine bags and 50kg of excess luggage, but we were on our way back to BREILA and really looking forward to our next adventures in the south of Chile, and our planned assault on Cape Horn.