June 20 - Another short update. We are currently somewhere in West Virginia after driving about 620 miles today. At our typical pace on the boat that distance would have taken about 12 days not counting stopping at places. This land thing has it's disadvantages but one of them is not speed of travel.

We have had a great vacation from our life's vacation. We have visited more friends and more friends along with family and of course our doctors. We will live another year and we just had a great time talking to everyone and catching up. I've enjoyed everything on the trip and the latest was our stay at Mike and Gina's where we got to see even more people. Mike and I got to head out to the Merimac River to wade/swim the river fishing. The water was up some so there were a few times we literally did have to swim to the other shore. It was a successful trip since we caught fish. Mike landed a very nice smallmouth along with a number of other bass and fish. I lucked out and landed two nice largemouth and a number of small bass and fish. The current was strong enough that after 3 1/2 hours of swim wading, we headed back to St. Louis.

Again, we had a wonderful trip but it is time to get back to the boat. We are both ready to get the boat back in shape working on it for about 5-7 days and then get underway on our trip further up the east coast which you already know about. I'll start updating on a regular basis again and let you know if I come with anything new on the boat as we get it ready. One thing I'm going to do is put a bunch of coats of Polyglow on the hulls to try and protect it from any oil we might encounter on the way back down this fall. Our plans are still to go to Ft. Myers and buy a house so we can start cruising part time but until we get there we just don't know what will happen.

We only have about 350 miles to go tomorrow so we should be there early afternoon to get the boat back on line. See you then.

 June 23 - We are back. We arrived in a heat wave in New Bern. I don't know how many ways I can say hot or emphasize the word HOT but hopefully that will do. Deb and I are re-evaluating our plans for moving north. Not that we are staying here, just altering our timing. I'll tell you more later but for now, I want to give you a few pictures of our trip. 

When we were in St. Louis, in addition to helping out my cousin's on the house sale, Deb and I had some fun too. One day we went to Fitz's for lunch where I got a Fitz's Root Beer which is bottled right there in Maplewood. You can see a couple of pictures of the vintage bottling operation which was running as we ate lunch. The real deal is to get the mug of root beer because they keep filling it as you eat. Little did they know I am a liquid drinker each morning and afternoon. I got lots of root beer.

 When we were off in Omaha, Steve and I went out to fly one of his kites. Yes, even old guys can have fun flying a kite. They fly great in a light wind and the reel with the monofilament makes it easy to get them up to altitude.

 Something else we did was make a service call. Steve had upgraded an engine and it didn't seem to want to run quite right. It ended up to be a simple fix and it was running within 30 min of us arriving. I would like to say I had a great hand in that but but reality was I just took some pictures. The guy on the left is Steve and the guy on the right was someone else at the airport pitching in. The owner, who built the plane, is about 86 and still is flying. That gave me great motivation to continue in aviation once we get some kind of land base again.

Cool plane don't you think?

So that brings us to today. The temperature was 98 today and according to the news it felt like it was 107. Tomorrow it is supposed to be 99 and it will feel like it is 105=110. Now tell me, do you really want to be out boating at 7 mph in those temperatures? Not me. So, the only real things we have gotten done is to unpack, mount the new grill (80 bucks at Lowe's), reprovision (they had a power failure and the Engle went off meaning we lost all food stored - can you spell stink), and we returned the car. Tomorrow I will work in the morning and then be back inside during the afternoon.

It looks like we will get a break and should be out of here on Tuesday or Wednesday, we will just have to see. I'm very happy we have a new Honda Generator because it will really get a workout this summer. We are thinking we will be starting north and stopping when the heat builds to start the generator and try and stay cool. If we continue to have storms in the afternoon that will mean we won't be going outside from Norfolk. Instead we will just head up the Chesapeake and up to Baltimore. Then with the right weather we will head down the river and on to the New York area. If the weather stays as hot as it has been we will skip New York and go up Long Island heading for Boston. If we have to we will just hang out in Boston until summer is almost over and start south seeing everything on our way back down. This is supposed to be an active hurricane season and I can tell you right now that if it stays this hot, it will be a very active season. I hope we are able to get far enough north to miss most of it.

We will start trying to post more now that we are back.

 June 27 - Work, Work, Work and a bunch of sweat. The boat is coming along very nicely and I've been cleaning and Poly Glow -ing for the last 5 days. When cruising, you really don't have the opportunities to clean up the exterior of the boat like you do when you are at a marina. Since we paid for a month here in New Bern it was just the right thing to do to get the boat back up to shape cosmetically. Last summer, I replace the three big horizontal tinted windows but did not replace the small ones. I decided it was time to clear them up a bit because I just didn't want to take on the project of replacing them at this time. You can see to the right what one of the windows looked like before the process I used. And below right is the result. Pretty good.

What I did was to use a random action sander with a pad and first I used Prism Polish as a fine polishing compond to knock off the worst of hazing. Then I used Meguars PlastX for the final process. Clean it up and you can see again. I know I'm messing with the coating on the outside but who cares since you couldn't see through them too well anyway. This way, I will get another six months or more out of them.