California and Pacific Northwest Week #1 and Week #2

Apologies for the long hiatus between blog posts but we’ve been taking care of a bunch of life matters in recent weeks so haven’t been up to much adventuring. But all that’s been sorted and now we’re back on the road for a final couple months before we head off to New Zealand in late September. A quick catchup since the last blog post - we spent two weeks visiting family in Massachusetts in June. Highlights included reading my grandmother’s (Oma’s) memoir, going for lots of beautiful walks, running the Northampton 5k Cross Country race, playing in a 9 ball tournament at my dad’s house and of course spending lots of time with family. Then we returned to California and picked up our van from San Diego and drove up to Santa Monica where we were going to be housesitting for my aunt while she was traveling for two weeks. It was super helpful to have the housesit as we needed to buy heaps of furniture (got rid of most things when we left LA) and pack up our storage unit for the mov...