OK, we are still fighting to recover from the Photobucket fiasco, so I know some of you still can’t see any of our posted pictures.  We have not forgotten you, we are working it, but we are at our wits end as to how to solve the problem of some readers having no trouble seeing our pictures while others, depending on how they arrive at our site or what platform they are using, are not able to see anything but broken links.  Stick with us, we’ll get it fixed.

The Distance: We said we wanted to get someplace and settle down for a while, reducing our gas expenditures and maybe taking advantage of long stay rates, and in July we did just that.  We traveled a grand total of 47 miles from Langley in South Whidbey up to the Naval Air Station RV campground in Oak Harbor and then down to the Staysail city park.  This brings out 2017 mileage up to 4,862, a huge slowdown from the last few months.  August will see a major uptick as we begin working our way east across the top of the country.

The Places:  We spent another six days at the Island County Fairgrounds before moving up to the Naval Air Station’s Cliffside RV Park for 23 days.  We closed out the month with two days at Staysail City RV Park just a handful of miles from the navy base.  It was all military (23 days) or municipal parks (8 days) this month.  We enjoyed full hook ups for 25 days (with free WiFi!) and a power and water site (now WiFi) for 6.  Other than the obviously subsidized military rate, we didn’t get any discounts from our clubs or memberships this month.

The Budget:  A combination of tight control during the first half of the month, no gas fill ups for Serenity, and four successful Second Street Markets along with one fantastic Kiwanis Beachcomber Bazaar allowed us to finish 10.5% under budget.  We did so even with higher than average RV campground costs ($28.71 a night) and a loosening of the purse strings in the latter half of the month.  It’s gonna be hard, if not impossible, to completely get on track for the year after more than $2000 in dental expenses in May, but we have at least made progress towards reducing the impact.

The Drama and the Improvements:  Not much to report this month.  I wish I could truly get into the habit of “one small improvement every day,” but at least we had no major incidents or failures this month.  We washed Serenity, we reorganized several major underbelly storage compartments, and redid our jewelry racks (including building a new one) but that’s all small ball.  Next month I hope to report a final solution to our embedded photo crisis.  The bottom line is I either need someone to help me sort out the glitches associated with third party hosting on Google Drive as it is seen from different platforms, or I need to do a lot of grunt work (again!) uploading and reestablishing two years worth of embedded pictures on an entirely new image hosting service. Ugh!

Here are our monthly reports for the year so far:

• June
• May
• April
• March
• February
• January

And here are our 2016 and 2015 annual summaries, each of which have embedded links to the individual monthly reports from those years.