[Rockhounds] Home are the rockhounds...

[Kitty & Bill Heacox]

Hi List,
Bill and I are back from a 5 month sojourn while he’s been on sabbatical 
leave from University of Hawaii at Hilo. We left on March 1^st for 
Tasmania, then wandered through a good part of the rest of Australia and 
a brief re-visit to New Zealand, and had only a 10-day stop at home in 
Hilo before heading for the Pacific Northwest on May 5^th . After 
visiting friends & relatives in Washington & Oregon we took off on June 
1^st for British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and Alaska, and took the 
ferry on July 10th down the Inland Passage to Bellingham. After a few 
more friend/family visits, we got home to Hilo day-before-yesterday, 
July 21.

Along the way we visited List Members: Steve Sorrell (near Hobart, 
Tasmania), John & Julie Siebel (Santa, Idaho), Hilmar Kroke (Vancouver, 
BC), and John Cornish (Pt. Angeles, WA). We shipped back many very heavy 
boxes (your guess as to the reason for their weight ;-) ), and did 
everything from attending an opera (Carmen) to celebrating 4^th of July 
in a town of less than 300 people in Gustavus near Glacier Bay, Alaska; 
from picking pebbles on Obstruction Island which my family used to own, 
to noodling (no, not catching catfish with your bare hands) in Coober 
Pedy and Andemooka.

The night we got home I got up in the night and tripped over a box our 
house-sitters had left in our bedroom and fell forward, banging both 
knees and one hand on the floor and my face on a chair---right on the 
bridge of my nose between my eyes. So I have some very sore muscles and 
joints, and two black eyes.

But other than that the trip was great! I’ll send some reports of 
rockhound interest in a few days, after I’ve gone through the roughly 
2000 email messages that accumulated in our absence.

Aloha, Kitty