We took our second cruise on the historic sailing ship Sea Cloud with Roger and Peg in May. She is a four-mast hand-sailed barque that was built by Marjorie Merriwether Post and EF Hutton as their private yacht in the 1930’s. Our first cruise on her was in the Caribbean in 2018. This time we sailed from Naples, Italy around Sicily to Malta and back through the Aolian Islands in the Mediterranean.

The stops in Sicily included Palermo, Erice, Marsala, Syracuse, Taormina and Messina. The Aolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea included Lipari and Stromboli. Most impressive was the island of Malta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the Great Siege of Malta took place in 1565 when Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent tried to take the island from the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (an order of Crusaders also known as the Knights of Malta). That was our first exposure to the history of the Ottoman Empire, which expanded greatly when we visited Türkiye later in 2023.

Click on any image below to view a slideshow of full-size images.

Not all of our travel was to far-away destinations this year. There are many interesting places within an easy day’s drive from home, and we sampled a few in 2023.

There is always the world-famous Bethune Beach Boardwalk.

And there is Hogsmeade just on the other side of Orlando.

We visited Savannah, Georgia in February with Roger and Peg.

And to close out the travel year with Roger and Peg we visited St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what is now the contiguous United States, for the famous Christmas Boat Parade.

John was still moving a bit slowly and still in his full leg brace on our next adventure with Roger and Peg. In December we went as far to the south as we could without leaving US territory by going to St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Recall that there were still somewhat scary quarantine restrictions on getting back into the US in December 2021.

In June, we extended the reach of our travels by heading out west to San Francisco with Roger and Peg and planned to then go hiking on the California Coast trail and in Mendocino wine country with Danielle who flew up from San Diego. Things did not go entirely as planned.

The first few days in San Francisco were great. We walked 10-12 miles each day on the hills of San Francisco and on Alcatraz Island. We also got to see John’s California cousin Kathy and her husband Roy.

But apparently, we had a bit too much fun and exercise for folks our age. On day 3 John fell on a step and significantly injured his right leg. Not realizing the extent of the damage and thinking it might be just a muscle pull, we continued the trip with John hobbling around but not keeping up very well. Danielle drove us up to Mendocino and John was able to take some great pictures. It wasn’t until we got back home that it was discovered that John had severed three quadriceps tendons and needed a quadriceps rebuild, which was delayed until August due to a Covid code black emergency at Orlando hospitals. Other than that it was a pretty good trip.

After 12 months of relative isolation, we got our vaccinations in January and felt safe enough to venture out in late February on our first non-family travel venture since Covid began. We drove to Key West to meet Roger and Peg, stopping on the way to see Lee and Bill at their place in Rotunda West. We stayed at a quaint boutique hotel right on Duval Street and did a lot of walking around the town, viewing sunsets and visiting sights like the Hemingway House, Truman’s Little White House, a butterfly encounter, a lighthouse and a rum distillery that had converted its process to make hand sanitizer to overcome a shortage during the pandemic. Seems that there is a lot of similarity between rum and hand sanitizer!