Well I haven’t posted in a very long time. Sorry about that, I am going to try and not let that happen again.
So what has happened since June? Quite a bit…
It took us 5 long days of motoring to get up to St. Mary’s, GA. This is where we decided to leave the boat, till our next sailing adventure. It was an uneventful trip from Fort Pierce to St. Mary’s, with the exception of a few Florida Thunderstorms. The most eventful one, was when we were zig-zagging our way into St. Mary’s, we saw very black clouds trying to intercept us, before reaching Lang’s marina. So we are pulling into the dock and with 30 seconds of getting dock lines on, no exaggeration, the wind picked up and the rain began to downpour. Then within 2 minutes the waves began to build up and start banging our boat against the dock hard enough that I had to fight to get more fenders in between the dock and the boat, to prevent the gelcoat from getting damaged. I was soaked, but very happy that the storm didn’t hit a minute or two earlier, because then we would have to motor into the strong wind and rain for 30 minutes, which would have been nerve racking and tiring after a very long day of sailing.

So that was the end of that chapter of our sailing adventure. We stayed in St. Mary’s a few days, rented a van one way, loaded all of our stuff up, secured the boat well and headed back to Philly.

Nadia had planned a trip to visit her Mother for two months in August, so my plan was to go back to the boat for a month and work on some boat projects. So for the month of September, I drove my car down there, and cleaned up the deck, refinished some of the teak, polished some of the stainless, and so on. It was a nice relaxing trip. I explored St. Mary’s and went down to Jacksonville a few times. I’m looking forward to going to this Mexican restaurant in St. Mary’s again, which I frequented.

After that, I drove back up to Philly, and Nadia got back, and we really lucked out, because we had rented out our condo, but the girl that rented it, needed to move out, so we got our place back, perfect timing. We decided to enjoy our place, and living on land, for a while, because before that we were kind of roaming from my parents to Nadia sisters, and wherever, without a place of our own.

So you may have looked at the map and saw that we were in Canada, and all over the Caribbean, well obviously it wasn’t on our boat. We went on a road trip up to Bruce Peninsula Park in Ontario. This park is awesome. We camped, hiked and cooked out. Even though it rained a good amount of the time, we had a good time. We stopped in Toronto for one night, and stopped in Niagara falls. Overall it was a great trip, and I would highly recommend Bruce Peninsula Park.

As for going all over the Caribbean, that was on a cruise ship. I know people are pretty divided on cruise ships, and honestly we went on one cruise before, and promised we wouldn’t go on one again, because it just wasn’t our cup of tea. But… we were looking for a cheap vacation and we thought about another road trip, but the cost of hotels and all that adds up, and the cruise was very low priced. We paid $650 each for 11 nights, which included our room, our food and all the activities, with 5 stops in various islands in the Caribbean. Well we really enjoyed ourselves, and this cruise was so much different then the one we went on before. Sure the cruise has some negative things, like only having about 8 hours in each place, and getting off the ship in a huge herd of tourists, but for a very cheap, very luxurious vacation, you can’t even come close. It also gave us a taste of the five different islands we stopped at, which were Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, USVI, Haiti(privately owned cruise ship area, not the real Haiti), St. Martin and St. Kitts. We liked all the places except the cruise ship owned beach in Haiti.

So we have been in Philly for the last couple months. I have been doing some side work programming. We had to do some work on our rental property, and we have a tenant lined up to move into our condo in February. So we are starting to get ready to move back to the boat. Our plan right now is to drive down to the boat, work on it in St. Mary’s for a week or two, and then head down to the Keys for a little while, and finally bring it back up to the North East. But are plans are written in pencil, so they might change.

Oh, and I changed the look and feel of the site a little. You should be able to comment, but I will have to approve them to prevent Spam. Hope everyone is doing well and don’t hesitate to contact us.