As you can see we are "back on the air" and if you are one of our "subscribers" you may be surprised to get the email announcing this "update" to whiteacorn. During our extended break from travels we received a number of enquiries asking about our situation and/or health and so I feel a brief explanation of the six-plus months gap in this journal is required.

Our interlude without the truck

After our stay in the AirBnB apartment in Delhi we flew to Sydney, eventually to be joined by our two sons and their wife/girlfriend, for a family Christmas reunion. It is a number of years since all of the Blackwells have been in Australia for Christmas and for our son's partners it was a "first meeting of the extended family".

All in all Nina and I spent a month in Sydney and thereafter flew to the USA and our house in Gig Harbor WA for a round of routine visits to doctors, dentists and tax accountants. From each of these we got a clean "bill of health".

The center piece of our planned interlude in the US was to be 3 months in Phoenix, so after Gig Harbor we loaded up our faithful SUV (which is stored at our house) and headed south to snow bird country. After a few weeks we settled into a rental apartment, with rented furniture.

Phoenix was intended to be a time of exercise (and for me weight loss), work on Richard (our son) and Lizzie's (his wife) house, and a motorcycle license. All these things got done, but in addition we had a rash of unexpected medical issues that gave us an opportunity to learn way more than we wanted about the medical services offered in Phoenix. These all eventually resolved into nothing too major but for a while we felt like doctor visits were our whole life.

I have often remarked to people that we will keep traveling "until the interval between doctor visits becomes so short as to make it impossible", well I thought for a while that such a time may have arrived. But fortunately not.

Towards the end of our time in Phoenix we attended Overland Expo 2015 West and along with the thousands of other participants spent a snowy, wet but enjoyable weekend at Mormon Lake, catching up with old friends and making some new ones. Following Expo we did a quick trip to South Dakota (why you ask?) where our vehicles are registered and our US drivers licenses are issued to get my new Arizona motorcycle license endorsement added to my SD license (complicated what).

Back on the road

So now we are back in Germany about to start the next chapter of our adventures in the Yellow Mog. We flew into Frankfurt on the 17th just in time to have dinner in a nice downtown restaurant with Ken, a United pilot, our next door neighbor in Gig Harbor, and an owner of a Malayan Tiger(overland vehicle not the animal!).

Earlier today (the 18th) we picked up the truck from Merex in Gaggenau. The guys at Merex had competed all the work we had agreed on and after a short drive to a local truck stop everything seems in good shape (with one exception which I will discuss in a bit).

We owe a special thanks to the guys at Merex, for storing our truck for such a long time and for generally looking after us whenever we impose ourselves upon them. So to Rene, Neil, Elke and Eugen, thank you (again).

We spent the evening at the truck stop sorting out gear and luggage. We brought a lot of stuff from the US and before leaving Gaggenau did a big shop-up at a local Aldi supermarket, so we had to find a place to put it all in the truck. That took most of the afternoon and evening.

To my relief the camper's house batteries seem to be in good shape. While in the US I started to worry that storing them for so long without charging may result in damage and I was afraid that finding replacements in Europe might be difficult.

While checking out the truck this afternoon one of the chores was to re-connect and test the house water system. Well that test produced a flood of water from, of all places, the plumbed-in Brew Express coffee maker. Fortutanely there is an isolation valve to cut the coffee maker out of the water system so we can run without repairing it. I will look inside the thing in a few days to see if I can resurrect it. But for the moment I need to find another way to make coffee - wish I could run to a Starbuck every morning, but alas not.