Back from vacation

My family and I just returned from a week of vacationing in Southern California. For some reason we generally like to drive on these trips instead of fly - today was a doozy, over thirteen straight hours of driving, but we ended up with a total return trip (San Diego to Bothell, ~1300 miles) time of 19.5 driving hours (Los Angeles traffic just plain sucks!) One year we even drove from Seattle to Florida, to visit DisneyWorld - now that was a driving trip! We're back now though, safe and sound - Home Sweet Home!

Being pasty-faced Seattle-ites, we all now have red-neck style suntans (sunburns, actually - forgot to bring the protective lotion and then tried to tough it out). This was an old-fashioned American vacation meaning we visited centers of high American culture like DisneyLand, Universal Studios, SeaWorld, etc. I was able to dodge Six Flags again - phew, good thing because I'm a total wimp on roller coasters (seriously). I'm kidding about the American culture bit but it was fun; we have a lot of memories of these places from when our children were younger (used to live in Southern CA a long time ago). But I did mention to my wife that this is my last trip of this type, unless and until I have grand kids to take along.

I'm very glad to be back though - was getting jittery with no boat work - and I'll be getting back to work on the F22 tomorrow. Looks I have lots to catch up on, with a new blog (Menno's) and updates on all the others. I still have to do the touch-up paint work underneath the wingnet rails, then I'll be getting to work on the main hull. During my absence, my neighbor Sean left my new CNC-cut main hull form frames in my garage -- they look great at first glance! I'll post pics in my next post. I have two weeks of vacation left to go and the weather should be good, so hopefully this means I'll be making fast progress on the main hull.

I took a book about boat electrical stuff with me, and read it at night. Learned a ton about stuff that will never be needed for the F22 (inverters, generators, etc), but much of the rest was very useful, basic knowledge. Like cabling standards and nomenclature, battery types (wet vs gel vs AGM), calculating daily battery load figures, etc. Great stuff, but I need to now remind myself to keep things realistic for my F22. This is supposed to be a lean-and-mean trailor sailor, not the Queen Mary. :-)