About Us

Welcome! We’re Annette (the Blonde – writer/photographer) and Bill (the Padre – hauler and paper wrangler). We’re suburban Seattleites and former Northwest sailors, doing our best to spend the kids’ inheritance, one trip at a time. (We love you kids, and you’ll get all the books.) Initially we fired up this blog for practical reasons: To let the kids know where we were at all times. They do worry, but we’re not sure why. We took care of them, didn’t we?

What’s here for you:

I’m an obsessive travel researcher, have been all my life. Heck, I’m an obsessive researcher, period; I do it to relax. I’ve researched federal grant regulation exemptions and enjoyed it, so when I turn that focus to travel, good things happen; accurate, exhaustively researched stuff, at least.

And as former people helpers, we both miss inspiring others, so we hope to inspire you! Bill served people as a retirement home chaplain (hence the nickname Padre), so he can marry you, bury you, and counsel you, but nowadays he’d rather blow glass in the hotshop. He likes old geezers, old cars, and old things like bog mummies, skeletons, catacombs, and cemeteries, especially when there’s history to be learned.

As a former teacher/administrator, I loved helping people then, and still do today. Travel serves as rocket fuel for my other obsessions, including reading, research of course, and finding the perfect suitcase (I’m researching that).

I love making new travel friends, and one of my deepest fears is to be trapped somewhere with nothing to read. I also adore cats, which Bill barely tolerates. So you’ll find cat photos on our blog, as well as pictures of bog mummies and skeletons. We’ll do our best to keep the kitties and dead things to a minimum, though.

Why Blake Island Journeys:

You can’t live on Puget Sound’s Blake Island because it’s a state park near Seattle, Washington (although you can camp). We ‘live with’ Blake Island, since it hovers in view through our front windows. Sometimes the sun rises gloriously behind it, or the full moon looms above it. In winter, layers of drizzly fog cling to its shores for days at a time. When we can’t stand the Northwest gloom another minute we travel, and have for years.

This Paris picture gives clues to how long we’ve been at the travel thing (check out our hairstyles and that disastrous dress). So we’re old (ish), but not out yet, and busy seeing the world before we can’t anymore. When that time comes, we joke that we’ll morph Blake Island Journeys into a blog about that Final Journey we all face someday, and who knows? We just might. We like to help.

So that’s us. If this blog inspires you to take wonderful trips, smile more, read good books, or wring just one more drop of joy out of life…well, that makes the old helper parts of us happy as clams*.

*a Seattle cliché my boater family overused constantly. I still like it, because clams really don’t need much to be happy, do they?

 

 

Annette’s photo from a recent Key West stroll:

Bill’s Photo from recent Key West stroll:

DISCLAIMER:  This blog is a personal blog written and edited by us. For questions about this blog, please contact annab@blakeislandjourneys.com. We do not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions, and we are not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely our own. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.