Wednesday September 15, 2021.
Temp: 86/73, Humidity: 57/92%, Top Wind: SW8 mph, Precip: mostly cloudy, Miles Traveled: none
**********************************
This morning I went to the spa for an hour long massage. AHHHH! How nice! I like deep tissue massage, and the therapist always seems to find all kinds of sore muscles! In the last few months, I’ve had two bum shoulders at different times, and a rib stabbing me for awhile. I will certainly feel better now! And then, guess what?! I got my Costa Rica book! Book #2 arrived! So I called Alton marina and left them a message that they can open the package that came for me there, and offer the book to anybody who wants it. Now I get to start planning a future trip 😁 in my spare time…. Captain says I can’t stop working on the one we’re in the middle of!
We had a few more projects to work on today. Number one priority was to clean out Stuart and cover him up. I didn’t take any pictures of the swamp water that was growing in him, but it was G.R.O.S.S. Remember the bug-pocolypse that we had? Yea… well, there was a lot of water that ended up in Stuart, along with about ten thousand dead bugs. It was starting to smell like dead fish. And the water was turning green. So Kenny bailed out a bunch, then tipped Stuart up on his butt to drain out as much as possible. Then he scrubbed Stuart’s inner-belly clean and got the wash water out. We decided to cover the lil bugger up since we’re going to be having some rain for the next few days. He doesn’t drain well sitting in his cradle, and we don’t anticipate using him for … maybe the rest of the trip? 🤷♀️. It’s kind of weird to realize that we could be home in about seven weeks! 😳
Next up was to take out all the outdoor floor coverings and wash down all the dead bugs and dirt under them. EWWWW! More grossness.
We had flooring laying around on the dock drying. At least it was a semi-sunny day.
Ta-DA! Now that’s better!!
Kenny took at walk to the parts store that is way down at the end of the dock. It is a fantastic little store with all kinds of stuff. He purchased some plastic sanitation hose. Uh-oh, you’re thinking? Yea – our master head toilet has not been flushing well, so he’s been thinking that it was all calcified up and mostly clogged. So, he pulled out the old hose that goes from the toilet to the holding tank, and put a new piece in. That took a little while and some yoga moves on his part, but he got it all fixed. 👍
While Kenny was working on all of the boat projects, I was working on reservations for our next moves. When we leave here, we’ll stay one night at a State Park marina, then two nights in Clarksville, then three nights in Nashville. It’s still too warm for anchoring out, so we decided to stay one additional night here at Green Turtle, then move along. We’ll have rain and temperatures in the 80’s, with lows in the mid 60’s. 🥵. The Kentucky Lakes are beautiful, and we’d like to explore more…. but with the upcoming weather, maybe we’ll explore on our way back from Nashville.
[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]
Thursday September 16, 2021.
Temp: 85/66, Humidity: 57/92%, Top Wind: E7 mph, Precip: none- cloudy then sunny, Miles Traveled: 2 on Speedy
++++++++++++++++++++++++
The morning started out warm and humid, and it got toastier throughout the day. Another few projects got done. The gutters in the hatches and the drains in the cockpit got cleaned, and all the batteries got watered. Mr. Mechanic looked back in our records, and we bought these batteries in mid 2017. THAT is amazing. Generally, batteries only last about three years in Florida, and these are over four years old. We’ll probably need to get some new ones before long.
Kenny didn’t want to go with me, so I rode Speedy to town to explore Patti’s 1880 Settlement by myself. It’s less than a mile away. What a cute place, and WAY bigger than I thought!
I think I forgot to tell you that we went here for dinner with the couples from Sweet Haven, Dream Weaver, and Legacy on the first night when we all arrived at Green Turtle. Bummer that I didn’t take any pictures that evening! We were seated in our own little dining room. It was so cute, and our little Southern pixie of a waitress was just adorably sweet with her Kentucky accent, y’all! Patti’s is known for their pork chops, so I had an apple glazed one, and Kenny had a tropical one with pineapple. They were cooked SOOO perfectly, you could cut them with a fork. So good!
The property has all kinds of shops, an inn, a big outdoor dance floor, a mini golf, a chapel, and more! They were busy putting up a gazillion Christmas lights for their upcoming Festival of Lights. Are we really that close to the holidays already???
A cute neighborhood of birdhouses.
This was just so pretty!
The chapel is used for weddings, of course. The town of Grand Rivers consists of Patti’s Settlement, a grocery store, an ice cream stand, a post office, and maybe two other stores. I think Patti’s takes up half of the acreages of the town.
The Pink Tractor was just one of the cute little boutique shops. I stepped into most of them and they were all full of fall and winter clothes. I don’t have much need for a ‘winter’ wardrobe, but it was fun to stroll through.
It was a fun little tour. I didn’t buy anything. I was hoping to find some hard scoop ice cream, but the only thing I found in town was soft serve. That’s not my favorite, so I didn’t get any. In this heat, it would have melted faster than I can eat it. So, I headed back to the marina.
I’ve been trying to figure out if and how we might need to change our plans for going to Nashville. I was reviewing the USCG Notice to Mariners for the Cumberland River. There is a notice in there that says there is bridge construction just upriver from Clarksville and that the navigation channel will be closed from 0600-1800 daily. 😕 That sucks. It gives a phone number, but nobody answers. 🤦♀️ It’s interesting that the notice does NOT show up on the USACE Nashville District list? 🤨. Usually they show up on both.
We don’t like to go in the dark (before 6am or after 6pm this time of year.). So I put a question on the Great Loop Facebook page to see if anybody had any current intel. I got one response that said the barges are in place, but nobody was working on the weekend. Hmmm… we’d be going through there on Monday morning. The response also said that they stayed at the downtown Nashville docks, (which is where we will stay) and they didn’t have power the last two days they were there. 🙄 Then this afternoon, I got an e-mail from the Nashville docks, saying they won’t have power until Tuesday or Wednesday while the Metro works on something. Our reservations are for Mon, Tues & Wed, and we can change or cancel our reservation. Shoot. Well… we could stay at a marina that is out of town, so I scoped those options out. One has a fun looking brewery nearby, so that would be good. But we’d have to Uber into town. Maybe two nights there, and two nights downtown? Then I had the idea to see if there were any concerts in town. By Golly – Eric Clapton will be at an arena that is near the downtown docks! But on Tuesday. And there are tickets (mostly resale) available! I showed it all to Kenny. It’s only supposed to get down to about 62 degrees on Tuesday night, so we may have to run the generator and a/c for awhile if we don’t have power yet. But let’s do it! Let’s do one night at the ‘brewery’ location, and just push our downtown nights out by one to Tues, Wed, Thurs. It’s so nice to not have a schedule and to be able to just change stuff whenever! So – I bought the Clapton tickets, and tomorrow I will get our docking reservations straightened out. But – we still don’t have a good plan for getting through the bridge construction. 🤔