2025 in Photos 😎

Greetings Friends and Family,

As you probably know, 2025 has been a year of major transitions for me and Jim. We sold our condo in Annapolis and bought a place in San Miguel de Allende (SMA) in the central highlands of Mexico - our new permanent home. We still have the trawler, Neverland, in Anacortes WA and live aboard it in the summers, cruising the Pacific NW.  If you are curious about SMA there's a lot on the web, since it has been named, both is the past and for 2025, as the most beautiful city in the world. 

Below are a few photos to help describe what we've been up to this past year. First, a few photos of the center of SMA which is about a 20 minute walk from our place. There is no need for a car here since we walk everywhere. 

Below is a pastel of a main street in the city center. I never lack for things to paint here!

The temperature is a pleasant 55-75 F from September through April and it's safe and fun to walk, so the streets are alive with people, music and events day and night.

When we moved, we donated almost everything we had in Annapolis to nonprofits (except the cars, which we sold). We brought clothes and a few favorite things, like Thelonious Monk below.  We bought our place furnished and the city offers us many, many opportunities to make or buy new art and Mexican crafts. 

This is our wonderful neighbor, Jan, with Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Ruthie) our fierce little community guard poodle. 

After spending much of the spring doing moving-related stuff, we rejoined Neverland in Anacortes WA in late May. We relaunched her and soon headed out to live aboard for the summer. This Eagle 40 pilothouse trawler is the perfect summer home for two nomads like us who just want to keep exploring new parts of the Pacific NW.  

Lots of blue sky and water, deep green forests, snowy mountains in the distance, ferries, fishing boats and great marine parks.

There are many, many gorgeous isolated places to drop an anchor or pick up a marine park mooring ball.  Below is Fossil Bay on Sucia Island.

Jim at his best! 

On July 4 we dinghied to a "No Kings" protest in Lopez Village in the San Juan Islands. Of the 3,000 or so summer residents in the village, over 1,000 showed up to protest. 

Neverland on a mooring ball at Jones Island where we love to go ashore and hike the marine park trails. A mooring ball is about $12-$15 a night and the boat is safe, secure and in calm, protected waters - what a deal. 😎 

Beautiful end of the day light on golden grasses.

A typical white and red navigation light. 

A painting of Boat Pass on Saturna Island. Watching small boats power through this cut between rocks and against the current can get pretty interesting.

One of the beaches at Montague Harbor

Moon rise over Nanaimo Harbor on a calm night.

Me with a moose. We spent a week in a marina in False Creek in Vancouver - a very cosmopolitan environment for a complete change of scene.

The view from our slip at the marina.

A pastel of somewhere in the Gulf Islands, north of the Canadian border. Most of our time this past summer was spent cruising in Canadian waters.

A shell beach on Russell Island just south of Salt Spring Island in the Gulf Islands. 

A pastel of that beach.

Everywhere you go there are kayakers. Many tent camp at night in the marine parks and kayak from island to island for a couple of weeks or so.

One more sunset. Couldn't resist this one!

We struggled throughout the summer to get an appointment with a Mexican Consulate anywhere in the US  to be interviewed in person as part of our application for Mexican Permanent Residency. With permanent residency we can enter and leave Mexico with no imposed time limits for our stays in Mexico. We were finally able to get an appointment in Albuquerque in early September, so we put the boat back on the hard in Anacortes WA, flew to Albuquerque and eventually got notice that we had permanent residency status. This was a big deal and we were very relieved that it worked out. 

While in the southwest we decided to visit Santa Fe and Taos to see again the beautiful artwork there.     

We returned to SMA just in time for the many festivals there in September and October.  The first was Independence Day, with hundreds of people arriving on horseback from neighboring pueblos. Later there was a blessing of the horses. The fierce expression of pride shown by hundreds of people all shouting "Viva Mexico!!!" over and over again was impressive, to say the least. 

The next several photos just show how colorful and charming the SMA facades, architecture and bougainvillea are. 

This is the courtyard at the library where I go to study and practice Spanish. 

To begin to take advantage of all the amazing creative activities here, Jim has been doing metal work and I've just begun work in a clay studio. I don't have good photos yet of anything we've made - stay tuned. In addition, there are many, many ways to get involved in volunteer work here. We did some volunteer work recently with a group in their 10th year of making all kinds of free, fun stuff for kids to do to celebrate the Day of the Dead.

As always, there was a huge parade through town with people and even horses decorated as skeletons. It always seems like EVERYBODY gets into the spirit and joins the parade. Even the cops had very impressive face paint. I was amazed that anyone was left on the sidelines to watch the parade go by...

In mid-November I made a quick trip to see Jake in San Francisco and, as always, I had a great time meeting lots of his friends. One rainy evening I went with him to Mission Cliffs to watch him and his belaying buddy rock wall climb.  It's a super popular place for both men and women and it's cool to see different climbers' techniques at their various skill levels.

Back in SMA, a friend who organizes many volunteer activities invited us to join about 40 other people at a Thanksgiving pot luck at her house. It seems that people here don't really make or eat pie for dessert, so I made a blueberry pie just as something different. Not traditional Thanksgiving fare, but in 70 degree weather blueberries seemed entirely appropriate. It was a hit!   

Now we have thousands of lights illuminating the downtown streets at night as Christmas approaches. Poinsettias are everywhere, replacing the thousands of bright yellow chrysanthemums that decorated the city for the Day of the Dead.

We will be here through the holiday and are curious to learn how Christmas and the New Year are celebrated in SMA. As 2026 approaches, we wish you peace and good health, now and in the new year.

Love,

Cynthia and Jim