Friday, October 1, 2021 🍂🍁
Temp: 80/68, Humidity: 67/100%, Top Wind: S6 mph, Precip: partly cloudy, some sprinkles, Miles Traveled: ~40 in a courtesy car
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Just like at home when we have a stay home day, we have a list of things to do. But reality says that some of those things can wait a day or two until the next stay home day, right? 😁 We did borrow the marina’s courtesy car to go to Corinth for grocery shopping and stocked up on some fresh stuff. But a couple other things got delayed, like laundry and the engine thermostat. Here’s the deal. It’s a long walk to the laundry room here, because this is a huge marina. We are the blue dot on the right. Laundry is at the green dot on the left. I know, I know…. why am I wimping out on that!? I dunno. 🤷♀️. But we had some important contractual stuff we were trying to get done since tomorrow is the weekend.
What’s that, you ask? We just signed a contract to ship Island Girl to the Pacific Northwest in April! WHAT?!?! I KNOW! 😳 Hopefully everything works out like we think it will! I’m a big nervous nelly about it, but all expensive life changes bring a little bit of financial stress, right? Our plan is that she will be our summer home in Puget Sound, since we hate summers in Florida. We really miss our family and friends in Washington, and summers there are beautiful and comfortable. So we’re going to be ‘summer-birds’ and fly northwest for the summers. ☀️ The only issue with the whole plan is that we won’t have a boat in Florida. 🤔
About the chores? Well, our next two stops are Midway and Columbus. I originally thought we’d stay one day at Midway then two days at Columbus. However, the weather indicators say that Sunday is going to be a very wet day and not good for our itinerary. The deal is that our next six travel days have us transiting through twelve big locks, and seven of them are in the first two days. Remember I said that we’re at 414’ above sea level? We need to get down to zero in twelve locks. We really don’t want to do that in the rain if we have a choice. Tomorrow will be three locks, then there’s four to get to Columbus. Tomorrow’s weather looks pretty good, so we’ll skeedaddle in the morning and get to Midway, and I think we’ll stay two nights there and let it rain all it wants on Sunday. We can do our chores there. And then we can move along to Columbus on Monday – if the rain works itself out. 🌧
Even though we just bought a pile of groceries, we went to the restaurant here and had some pizza. I noticed this sign and it made me chuckle. We are at the borders of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, and college football is a WAAAAY bigger deal here than the NFL (or any other college conference, for that matter).
We ate dinner early, and then enjoyed some pretty golden Fall sunset colors. There are only a few other looper boats here, so I don’t think we’ll have any marina availability issues on our way down the hill. It’s weird, but we essentially only have about 16 travel days to get home from here. We’ll take longer than that, of course, but it’s still kind of weird!
I missed posting this yesterday! We saw several bald eagles as we moved along the river. We watched one eagle swoop down and grab a big fish, but then it couldn’t get enough lift and had to drop the fish. Its partner, we assume, immediately came right out, swooped down and grabbed the fish and took it up to a tree where the first eagle went. Hopefully this short little clip of my video works in the blog!
Maybe tomorrow will be more exciting than today’s episode – for your reading pleasure. 🥰