You might have wondered where Silhouette and her crew are and what we’ve been up to this past hurricane season.
Well, we arrived in San Diego the end of May, just in time for our daughter’s visit the beginning of June. Robin flew out with her two youngest kids-our other grandkids, and our son-in-law Sonny weren’t able to come. We had a fun-filled week on the boat with swimming, playing on the beach, visiting the Wild Animal Park, and Maddie’s favorite-watching the birds diving on the water for fish. We found out Natalie is an M&M-aholoc too 🙂 We were able to spend part of the time at anchor and the other part at a marina. The girls got to really get a feel for the boat. Everyone did great!
July we spent at anchor in downtown San Diego. The view was spectacular! The Forth of July fireworks were shot off just a few feet from Silhouette. Talk about front row seating. Liana was able to spend much needed time with her sisters.
August and September Silhouette was berthed at Fiddlers Cove Marina in San Diego Bay. During that time Steve was mostly in Colorado spending time with family there. Liana got to spend a lot of time with our family in the San Diego area and attend our nephew’s wedding. Congrats Johnny and Lace!
We had a missionary family of seven stay on our boat for almost two weeks. A while back when we were in La Paz we met the Kelly’s. They had come from Fiddlers Cove in San Diego. They gave us a lot of pointers and really helped us out. The Kelly’s were on their way to France for hurricane season and we were headed to San Diego.
As it turns out they were in need of a place to stay in late August/early September and Liana would be traveling during that time. It seemed like a good fit so they flew in and were welcomed by many of their old friends. It turns out this was not only the same place they departed from when they began their journey but the same slip their catamaran stayed for many months when they lived here.
So while the Kelly’s were settling in on Silhouette Liana was traveling the country coast to coast. The first stop on the journey was to visit our son Johnathan and daughter-in-law Heaven and and our grandkids who live outside of Jacksonville, NC. John is in the Marine Corps and his young family were recently transferred from San Diego. Liana had the absolute joy of getting to know our grandchildren and making up for lost time. They made trips to the beach and even took the ferry out to Cape Lookout. Liana and our grandson, Wyatt collected shells until it was time for the ferry to pick them up. Wyatt had more shells than they had room for so he had to pick which ones he wanted to keep. He loves sea shells so he had some hard choices to make.
Little Alice ran and played in the sand and by the time the ferry returned she had run out of gas. She slept all the way home. By the end of the week hurricane Florence was twisting a few hundred miles off shore and had just been upgraded to a category four storm with its sights set on pounding the Carolinas. If you remember a couple years back we went through hurricane Matthew at the New Bern Grand Marina not far from our sons home now.
By Tuesday morning they were told to evacuate so liana helped them pack what few precious possessions they could carry in their cars. They locked the house, loaded up two cats, two dogs, and two little kids in two cars and headed for the closest safe place in Tennessee. Liana got dropped off in Raleigh and visited that evening with our friends Steve and Tempra before flying out in an absolutely crazy airport the next morning.
October and November finds the crew of Silhouette “hard aground” high up in the Colorado Rockies in a place called Weston. The last several years Table Rock Ranch, where we raise our three children and a few extras, has been leased out to friends. We never actually thought we would be back at the ranch. Almost seven years has passed. It went by like nothing and now here we are keys in hand wandering through a house full of memories.
We walked around the deck Steve and the boys built. The kitchen floors are hard wood oak but when we bought the ranch it was covered in old orange carpet. We were pulling up the carpet and found linoleum square tiles in bad shape so we pried off the old tiles to find thick tarpaper. Under that, to our great surprise, was hard wood floors. But the tar had seeped into the wood and it looked as if we might never restore it to its original state. WD40 did the trick and we used gallons of it. The kitchen was once a very small room with a door leading to the dining room and another door leading to the living room. Each room was small and Liana suggested we tear out the walls and and make one great room. So armed with sledgehammers we went to work. Lath and plaster walls make a mess when you demolish it. An interesting geological formation tops the hillside over the house and over the calving barns. It’s a natural flat rock tabletop, arrowhead shaped and six foot thick sandstone. The surface is pocked with small holes. From the top of this one rock we could see the whole canyon in every direction. Our kids had a few campouts here with their friends. I remember taking our old Willys Jeep up the mountainside to the top, switching back and forth up over rocks and tree stumps to the top. The ride was terrifying but once on top we could see 27 snow capped mountain peaks all the way to New Mexico.
This was a great place to raise our kids. Today we are scrubbing the walls and pulling up old carpeting. Yesterday my brother-in-law John brought his skid-steer and moved tons (literally) of dirt that had slipped down the hillside over the last fifty years up against the house.
We also loaded up metal laying around the ranch and took it down the mountain to be recycled. What’s next after the paint dries and the new carpet is laid? We don’t know if we will rent the place out again, sell it or keep it a while longer.
Four Generations of Onley’s
December continued to be busy with working on the ranch but we took time out to get to know our three little grandsons that live in Italy. Ryan and Abigail came to Colorado for Christmas so we got to play with Oliver, Rowen and Silas and several of their cousins on Abigails side. The funnest was when we took all the kids to the Greeley Model Train Museum. They ran around for hours playing with trains.
Christmas Day was spent in San Diego then a quick provisioning and we’re off to Mexico. Sooo happy to be back on Silhouette 🙂