What’s left of Tropical Storm Hanna passed through Portsmouth, Rhode Island last night. That makes one tornado and one tropical storm since we arrived here in late July. Where was this weather in Tahoe the last two winters?
So yes, we made it out of Tucson and we stayed there long enough this time to really start liking it. But then again, we fled just as it was getting to be summer. What a lovely spring they have there though.
Our plan to follow the border fell apart in El Paso. I guess we only had about three border towns in us. Mexico reminded us too much of those aspects of travel that we were trying to get away from. So we bee-lined it for Florida thinking that maybe we’d finally get around to taking those sailing lessons we swore to ourselves that we’d take back in, oh, Greece. Or Croatia. Or Italy. Or Thailand. The list correlates strongly with those places that are warm and wet and have good food. Places you’d love to stay longer in, if only you had a nice comfy pillow.
Unfortunately, we’re idiots. You don’t take sailing lessons in Florida in the summer. In fact, the school we were most interested in attending packs up and heads to Newport for the summer. Oh the irony.
After Florida, we headed for Savannah and Charleston and discovered that late spring is not the time to visit here either. That’s peak tourist season, since it gets pretty miserable for the duration of the summer. The Little White Haired Old Lady (LWHOL) meter was pegged. Pegged, I tell you.
Charleston left us pretty close to some of the best BBQ in the south, so we headed for my alma mater, Chapel Hill (Go Heels!).
I’m happy to report that Allen & Son and Bullocks still serve some of the tastiest pork on the planet. And Chapel Hill and Carborro are still mostly the same sleepy college town I left in 1986. There are changes, of course. Because of some bad tax decisions, businesses have largely abandoned Franklin Street for Carborro, which is good for Carborro and not so good for Chapel Hill. One positive result however was the closing of the Gap which blighted the corner of Franklin and Columbia. That Gap was to Chapel Hill what Borders is to Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz. Good riddance!
It’s a blur after Chapel Hill. We did check off a few states neither of us had been to: Oklahoma (okay, that was before Florida), Wisconsin, and Nebraska come to mind. But save for the most horrific Christmas store on the planet, Bronner’s in Frakenmuth, Michigan (where’s the umlaut?), there’s not much to recall. We did enjoy our time in South Dakota and Wyoming. We’d bought a National Park pass way back in El Morro, and we were determined to get our money out of it. We think we broke even in Yellowstone, which is always a delightfully surreal experience. We also highly recommend the Antler Inn in Jackson, if you’re ever in need of a relatively cheap moose-themed motel with fast WiFi. What’s not to like there?
By this point we were aiming for a sailing school in Seattle which would get us out on the Puget Sound and save us from living life east of the Mississippi. About a month later, we were not-so-proud holders of American Sailing Association (ASA) 101 & 103 certification, which means, well, almost nothing really. I think we spent about 8 hours in a sailboat, total. Think of it as a vague introduction to sailing, with a tedious written.
We were digging the sailing, so we started trying to figure out how to get more sailing time on bigger boats. What we finally settled on was chartering this boat out of Bellingham and paying an instructor to liveaboard with us for two days and teach us ASA 104, which along with the 101/103 is the minimum you need, in theory, to charter boats around the planet. Take that with a grain of salt, really. Because what anyone who actually charters boats looks for is logged experience, not ASA certification. But it was useful in the sense that 101/103 let us charter something out of Bellingham and after we dropped our 104 instructor off in Friday Harbor, we had five days of sailing around Puget Sound on our own.
(To Audrey and Bas: we sailed around Lopez but the entrance at Fisherman’s Cove is considered to be one of the trickiest in the sound. There’s a submerged rock there that likes to bite boats and a really narrow channel into the harbor and our charter company pretty much warned us not to go there. We tried the cell as we were passing, but there was no at&t coverage. Wow, if you’re going to live out in the middle of nowhere, you sure picked a nice middle of nowhere to live in!)
Kudos to San Juan Sailing, an absolutely first class charter company. And I say that even though we were forced to participate in a group prayer during the mandatory Skipper’s orientation meeting. Om namai Shiva, we were both thinking. Or was that praise Buddha? The mind boggles. Regardless, if you’re ever wanting to charter a boat on the Puget Sound, go straight to these guys.
Realizing that there’s just no economical way to sail a boat big enough to live on, we started looking for a sailboat to buy. By this time we’d consumed quite a few sailing and cruising books (”cruising” is a sailing term that means living on a boat for the purpose of actually going places as opposed to trying to impress people with the size of a boat you never sail) and had narrowed the field down to a Pacific Seacraft 40. That’s about the biggest boat either of us felt we could be comfortable on in the short term, but still capable of sailing around the world. There were only four for sale in the states and the newest one (1999) was also the least molested one and located in tax-free (for boat sales) Rhode Island. So that brings us to today and what’s left of Hurricane Hanna.
Well, there was one more tedious drive across the country, but we just let the Nüvi take us straight to Middletown, Rhode Island and so there’s not much to cover except for the pizza in upstate New York. It happened to be a Sunday when we were passing through the Hudson River Valley and my first and second choice Yelp spots were closed. So it was with utmost delight that the only place we could find that was open happened to dish up the goods. Tiff suffered through a no-cheese half and from that lone experiment we can now affirm that it’s the cheese. Same sauce, same crust, no cheese — horrible. Unbelievably bad. With cheese, foodgasm.
Our boat’s out of the water (”on the hard”) in Melville Marina, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island just north of Newport. All boats need work and ten year old boats, more so. That we expected, but what we didn’t expect was how long this was going to take to get done. We’ve been here since late July and I think we’ll be lucky if we have her back in the water in two weeks. It’s a combination of many factors and Hanna pointed out quite dramatically that we don’t really need to be heading down the east coast any earlier than next month anyway. But it sure would be nice to move aboard, not the least of reasons being that we’ll finally have our own kitchen again.
I’m not sure I can convey how awful the food is here. It’s got to be tied with Ohio in terms of worst food in the states. Unless you like clams or fried fish, I guess. It’s just unbelievably bland and unhealthy. Clams, lobster, and hamburger, and some of the worst “Italian” food you can imagine. We’re living out of the frozen natural foods section in between bouts with the local cuisine. You can tell a lot about a culture by its food, Bourdain said. And another thing he said about the states was, “if you view us the way you’d view any other indigenous culture, you’ll be better off”, or words to that effect. Wise words indeed.
We’re headed for the Florida Keys, ‘if we ever get outta here’. We will have some networking on board (more on that in another post), but I found a 12V WiFi router that combined with a 3G USB modem gives us anywhere from 400Kb to 1.4Mb anywhere there’s 3G service. The Keys are supposed to be 100% covered, according to the at&t 3G coverage map. We’ll see.
I’ll be posting some photos to my Flickr feed once we get our mast back on and actually start floating again. A good friend from DEC, who still lives in New Hampshire and has been helping us out the whole time, assures me there’s nice tropical sunsets at the end of the tunnel, but right now it seems like just a mess of strange parts and questionable outfitting decisions.
On a more positive note, we now have shiny portholes and a blank space where, “Mulligan’s Wake” used to reside. It’s supposed to be bad luck to rename a boat. So if we sink to the bottom of some far-away ocean, we’ll try to remember to blame ourselves for our misfortune.
We named the boat for our cat, one of the biggest downsides of this plan.
