Kathy 2026, Cruising, Music, The Journey

My Wish List for 2026 #cruising #restless #travel #music #writing

We found ourselves hanging out at Port Canaveral again today. We love watching the cruise ships. That’s how we found ourselves cruising on Utopia of the Seas last summer. That was a 3-day test cruise for Royal Caribbean (did not expect to like this cruise line) – we thought we’d be 1 and done. Instead, it instigated a 7-day cruise on Star of the Seas, my 25th cruise.

And once onboard Star of the Seas, not only did we have a blast with the nightlife – a Jazz Supper Club, Disco Night, 80s night, a romantic dinner at Chops Grille, and an evening at Lou’s Jazz Club, but we went on a sunset catamaran sail out of St. Thomas. Simply fabulous! So then we booked the brand new not yet sailing Legend of the Seas.

I’m been feeling so restless since then. I’m dying to get back out to sea. We have plans for a March cruise on Sun Princess and are double-booked next December on the newest Royal Caribbean ship, Legend of the Seas from Fort Lauderdale, but also Discovery Princess from L.A. We can’t be in both places at the same time so we’ll see which cruise wins.

Sounds fabulous right? But in the meantime, how do I stay landlocked in my house? I realized watching “Gone With the Wynns” on youtube and their latest boating lifestyle, that I really need to hit the road. Live in an RV, live on a boat. I need to be more mobile. Land or sea, it doesn’t matter. I just can’t stay home like this. I never really could. Isn’t it time for the next leg of “The Journey“? I may continue that story this year.

So to tide me over, I put together this video paired with 3 of my favorite songs I wrote in 2025. You might have heard them before. 😀

Kathy California, Catching up with the Bay Area, Disney World, Florida, Hotel California, Las Vegas, Moving, Pacific Northwest, The Journey, Travel

Adventures in Moving: Revisiting the First Leg of the Journey

After our first trip to Disney World together in 1999, we longed to move to Florida. Little did we know that our first interstate move, from San Francisco to Oregon, would be the first leg of the journey that would take us to Florida twice, Las Vegas twice, Oregon 3 times, and back to the SF Bay Area.

You leave a little piece of your heart in each place, so we can’t help but reminisce about some of the stops along the way, especially when we’ve owned a home.

Recently, we were remembering our first home in the NW Portland area on that first move. This is where we got our first 3 kittens (Skipper, Buddy, and Lovey) and, most recently, Shadow.

Looking up that home online, we discovered it had been sold about a year ago and the photos were still online. We saved the photos, of course, and wanted to post them here.

It was fun to see what they’d done with the townhouse since we owned it – some improvements we’d hoped to make: wood floors and grass in the backyard. They also put in bookshelves flanking the fireplace, but, unfortunately, that took away some of the living space, making for an odd layout (certainly with their furniture), combining 2 rooms into 1.

It was a great starter home for us, fresh up from the Bay Area where, like so many, we lived in a rental apartment. It was a thrill to move to a place where we could build and customize a new home, even if it was a townhouse. It was perfect for us back then.