Nashville

 After spending Sunday organizing and packing, today we are in Nashville. We left yesterday morning after spending an HOUR turning the boat around in the slip so Dave could work on the bow pulpit from the dock. The boat slips in this marina do not have a full length side dock so you have to position your boat so you can climb out onto that narrow 10 ft long piece of dock and for us that means backing into the slip. The front of the boat is then secured by lassoing tall wood pilings on either side of the bow with a loop of line around a boat hook. It requires a lot of agility and praying! In addition, since we are off the boat during hurricane season, we are required to double up on our lines. For Orion, that means a total of 10 lines!

We knew Madison and I could not crawl over the bow railing and lower ourselves down to that ridiculous piece of side dock, so we loaded the car, secured the animals on the dock and got me off the boat. Tom had to undo all the lines, turn the boat around in the fairway, with inches to spare, and tie it up again without me on board to help. He tossed me bow lines which I could then use to control the front of the boat and keep it from running into the dock while he wrangled the lines around the poles from the rear cockpit of the boat. It was a hot, sweaty job and took so long since it was a complete undocking and redocking. Tom maneuvered the boat like a boss and we “got ‘er done”.

We stopped in Winston-Salem to have a quick lunch with our looper buddies Steve and Kathy and slogged on till 7 pm when we finally pulled into Johanna’s apartment building lot. It started to rain just as we were unloading the car so that was another race to the finish! Traffic was heavy on I-40 and we drove through on large storm cell, bit otherwise the scenery was spectacular and the Smokey Mountains did not disappoint.

Running a couple of errands today then going out to Ben’s house after Johanna gets off work to check on the bathroom demo and go to Lowes to buy a new bathtub. When we come back in week after next we are spending 3 days helping the kids re-do their main bathroom. We have done it many times before and will actually be fun for us.

Tomorrow we load up the car and drive 8 hours to Kenosha to spend a week with Kate and family. It will be good to be back in Wisconsin even if it means another whole day in the car.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It Is Finished

Image
 And just like that our boating adventure of the past 2 years is over. We got up early to strip the bed and pack the last few items and made one last trip to the storage unit. We did one last inspection of all the nooks and crannies (with a flashlight) and actually found a small bag of acrylic glassware that had fallen down into a lower shelf unit, so we rescued that.  After loading the car to the gills, we took a couple of last pictures and walked away. I am sad on one hand because I loved our looping adventure on Orion, but by the time we left the boat it didn’t feel like “home” any more. We did something few people ever accomplish and I’m proud of that, and we always said we would know when it was time to move on, and it was. We drove to Baltimore with a stop at the Quantico Marine Museum that Tom has always wanted to see. Wow, what a great place! Reminded me of a Smithsonian. We spent over 2 hours there, ate lunch in their pub and drove the last 2 hours to Baltimore. Nothing beats
Read more

So close...

Image
 Today was one of those days we have been waiting for - warm, sunny, no fog, minimal crab pots and no "incidents".  We left Deltaville around 10 am after waiting till the fog dissipated  and traveled to Hampton VA without a hitch.  We even had our first 2 dolphins ride alongside the boat!  That was awesome!!  As you can see below, it was warm enough to go have a cocktail on the fly bridge and Dewey had his first little field trip outside on the boat too. We are nearly at our intended destination of the Norfolk area where we will have the boat hauled out of the water, the bottom painted and a couple of odds and ends attended to. We are looking forward to meeting our newest grand child, arriving next week and spending the holidays with family.  When we come back to the boat, it will be 2021 and we start the Great Loop adventure in earnest!  Stay tuned...
Read more

So. Many. Bins.

 It was day one of moving off the boat and we loaded so many bins! It’s not just packing, because as with all of our “moves” not everything goes to one destination. We like to keep it complicated! LOL! We have used color coded tape to mark which boxes are boat only, RV if that is what we do next, needs to end up in Hudson, but not this trip, and finally - things that must go with us now to Baltimore and ultimately Hudson. Sigh… We accessed our storage unit early this morning and made 4 trips with a fully loaded vehicle each time. Lots of empty drawers and closets now so we made really good progress today. Tomorrow Tom has a couple of boat tweaks to do while I finish packing and we should be completely done by tomorrow night. We will sleep one last night and pack up the last bedding and towels before leaving on Monday. We haven’t stopped meeting new boater friends - met the guy on the boat behind ours and found out he just bought the boat. He is an older guy alone, sold his house and is
Read more