Travels With Towhee

My second camping trip in 2025 will be coming up soon here, but I want to tidy up some fun and interesting loose ends from early in 2025 before I get into the next camping trip. Four different subjects coming up here … keep track. 🙂

First off, some of you will remember when the odometer on my big white truck’s dashboard turned over to 111,111 miles … wow! That happened in late December, 2023. Here’s a link to that blog post … LINK. Reader Virginia wrote a comment to that blog post and suggested that I might want to pay attention and let all of you folks know when the big white truck’s odometer turned over to 123,456. That was a great idea, thank you Virginia.

And so I did pay attention, and the truck’s odometer did turn over to that number … 123,456. It happened, in fact, during that first camping trip of 2025, when I was camped at Point Hudson Marina/RV in Port Townsend. I was out for a drive south of Port Townsend and I noticed the odometer reading was close, it was so close! When it hit that number, I pulled off the road so fast you couldn’t even say “buckle your shoes” fast enough. 🙂 The odometer turned over to 123,456 on July 21, 2025, the day before my birthday, how cool was that? 🙂 Here is the photo proof below. And for safety purposes, you can also see that the truck was not moving when I took the photo … rpms are around 500, and the speed is ZERO. I haven’t thought of the next odometer reading that would be cool … any ideas?

Second subject, some boating friends of mine who follow this blog, and who have NOT been inside the marina at Point Hudson with their boats … some of those folks asked me how much space there was for that cruise boat RED HEAD to spin around inside the marina. And all of those folks noticed that there was a second day-cruise boat inside that marina that was quite a bit larger than RED HEAD … so how does that larger boat turn around? These friends of mine know about boats, and they know about turning radius and space, etc. So these were really good questions. I looked back through my photos of my stay there in Point Hudson and found this photo below … it shows the larger day-cruiser boat, SARATOGA, at 77-feet in length, as it was pulling out and turning around in order to leave the marina. That boat, too, has twin engines at the back/stern, and bow thrusters at the front/bow, so it can spin in its own length. The photo below shows there is plenty of room to turn these boats.

Notice in the photo above that the boat RED HEAD (56 feet long) with its black hull is tied to the dock just to the left of the larger day-cruiser. Plenty of room. The sailboat that’s in front of that large day-cruiser is at the fuel dock, not tied there permanently.

For a bit different view, below is an aerial view of the marina with those two day-cruisers on the right side of the marina, just past the fuel dock, close to the entrance. Yes of course, larger boats need to be careful, especially single engine boats that don’t have a bow thruster. And we all need to take into account the wind … sometimes LOTS of wind. But it’s also true that other people on the docks come out to help their neighbors.

Ok, enough boat stuff. 🙂 The third subject here is statistics. I check once a year or so to find what countries people live in who read this blog, or who at least look at my blog even just once. Here are the statistics for the countries with the highest number of visits for this past year, 2025 …

Almost all of the people in the list above are repeat readers (I can tell by the IP number of their computer since that is recorded by the blog software any time anyone opens a blog post). So those folks above are the major readers. But there are 103 more countries on the list as well, from Albania to Yemen, and some of those folks could be return readers as well. The total number of visits to my blog in 2025 was 20,733 for the year, or 398 visits each week. Since I post once a week, that’s 398 visits to each of my weekly posts! That’s great. 🙂 Sure maybe some of those visits are mistakes, but surely some are truly looking for the information or the travel fun that I’ve posted. The spam prevention software on my blog works perfectly, rest assured! And the spam visits are not counted in these statistics. Links and comments on my blog are safe and secure. If you are reading here from a country other than the USA, please share that. All of us, all over the world, are in this together.

Also under this third subject heading of “statistics” is this little item … here are the FOUR most visited blog posts from the very first day that I started this blog, back in November 2016 and then all the way through 12/31/2025. I had not looked at this statistic before and was surprised and happy. Here are the four most visited blog posts for all nine+ years with the most visited one at the top of the list, etc. Each is underlined and is a link back to that blog post if you’d like to take a look back. Surprisingly to me, these four blog posts are still getting lots of visits today.

Puget Sound double-ended ferry boats.
Giant octopuses??  Yeah, right.
Anacortes … Guemes, what’s a “guemes”!
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

The fourth and last topic here is just a little musical interlude. Here’s a harp duet by two women from Denmark. The music in the video below is titled “Aus der Stille ins Herz” … from silence to the heart. Because of my celtic ancestry, I’ve listened to lots of amazing harp music. This one is extraordinary. Don’t study it. Just turn your sound on and sit back and let it be. Just let it fill your heart with peace and joy.