It has been a long and sometimes arduous journey since Holly and I made our decision to move to Italy back in January.  After having to pack up and get rid of 37 years of accumulate stuff, we have now been living out of our suitcases since the end of April.

• Two months in Lecce (after a two-day layover in Rome),
• a side trip to a wedding in Israel,
• one month in Lucca,
• ten days in Ireland,
• three weeks in Seattle with sister and brother-in-law Catherine and Stuart to prepare the documentation needed for our visa application with a side trip of a couple of days to visit my older daughters and our grandchildren in Spokane (my home town),
• a week in Mendocino, California with Holly’s brother, John, and his wife, Nan,
• and then to San Francisco to apply for our Elective Residence visas at the Italian Consulate,
• a side trip to Yosemite National  Park,  Lake Tahoe and the Napa Valley for 6 days while we waited to hear about our visas,
• we are now in Oakland until our departure for Italy
• Phew!

Next week we will return to Italy, departing on the 30th, arriving in Rome on the afternoon of October 1st and then taking a train to Lecce on the 2nd.  I cannot describe how much I am looking forward to unpacking and just chilling for a day or two.

So far I have tried to let our friends and family in the U.S. see and understand where we have been and the experiences we have had in Europe.  But during our sojourn, we have picked up several followers that live outside this country, some of whom have had little exposure to Seattle, the State of Washington and the West Coast of the U.S as a whole.  So for our foreign friends, I am going to post some pictures from our travels in the U.S. since we returned home.

Washington State and Seattle:

Downtown Seattle from Queen Anne Hill

Mount Rainier ghosting over the Seattle skyline

Puget Sound from Queen Anne Hill in Seattle

Monroe Street Bridge with Spokane Falls during its summer low period from downtown Spokane, my home town

Dry Falls, Washington – 400 feet tall and three and a half miles wide, this was one of the largest water falls in the world during the floods caused by receding glaciers after the various ice ages

Trapper Lake – high in the Cascade Mountains of Washington

Mendocino and the California Coast:

The gang with Point Arena lighthouse in the background

It difficult to do justice to this magnificent place in just a few photos, everywhere you turn is one more unforgettable vista

Yosemite and Lake Tahoe:

My best Ansel Adams imitation of El Capitan

The obligatory picture of Half Dome

Bodie, California – a ghost town that has been left as if the residents had just walked away

“I ain’t afraid of no ghosts”, with the possible exception of the floating apparition of the strangely familiar face in this image

They even left the pool table

Lake Tahoe with its crystal clear water

San Francisco:

Our friend, the red-tailed hawk, soaring nearly perfectly still in a 25 knot wind as it hunted for prey on the cliffs below the Golden Gate Bridge

The underside of Golden Gate

San Francisco from Fort Point right under the southern landing of the Golden Gate Bridge

The next post should be from our new home town of Lecce, Italy.

Ciao!