News from the Trenches

We’ve made our whirlwind tour around the country to take care of family & personal matters before making final preparations to go cruising this year.
We drove to TN on March 16, where we prepped, primed, and painted the porches and doors around the outside of the house. The weather was marginal for painting outside, but by the end of the week, it finally warmed up enough to work.  We also squeezed in a dinner meeting with our friends at the Chattanooga Sail & Power Squadron.  The highlight there was that one of our best boating buddies, Clint & Leigh, just purchased a bigger hole-in-the-water.  They’re in the motor yacht category now, and their new boat has many more things to break & fail.  Nonetheless, we wish them the best.

This is really fun at 70 mph!

We then drove northward for another day to Mansfield OH to take care of Sue’s uncle’s affairs.  Her uncle is doing OK in a nursing home, but we had to clean out the storage unit which still held his belongings from a year ago.  Sue placed an ad on Craig’s List to sell his motorized wheelchair, which was picked up by a scammer in Canada.  The scammer put forth all his lies and sob stories before finally asking Sue to wire money to cover the shipping charges.  After he claimed that he deposited money in Sue’s PayPal account, a quick phone call confirmed his lie.  He even sent Sue a fake email from PayPal with their logo and everything.

I was surprised to see piles of white crap still on the ground in OH!  As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get them to change into powder-white sand dunes of Florida.  And just to rub salt into the wound, on the drive back south, we ran into a mini snow blizzard just south of Cincinnati.  40 mph winds with snow coming down so hard that visibility was reduced to 100 yards at times.  Seems like ol’ man winter just ain’t gonna go away!

Next was New Orleans, where Sue took care of her medical check-ups & also got her “Oma fix” by spoiling our granddaughter for 4 days.  After some doughnuts, a movie, some carnival rides, and a huge ice cream cone, she was on a severe sugar-high, and we returned her to her parents! 

Finally, in case we ran out of things to do, we began notifying the myriad of people of our change of address to Florida.  Since the house in TN is for sale, and since we live on our boat, we needed to find some state somewhere to claim legal residence, so we can keep paying taxes to someone.  We decided to use a mail-forwarding service in Green Cove Springs FL to receive all our mail & then send it to a marina or general delivery post office as we travel.  So on our way back to the boat this week, we’ll stop at the Clay County Court House to change all our paperwork to a Florida address. 

At that point, we’ll have just two weeks to provision the boat & do final trip planning.  Looking forward to being on the boat & traveling northward to Chesapeake Bay this summer.