Thanks for joining us on this adventure as we share some of our travel and photos.
It's been a slow start to get this up and running. The short version is that I got the blog up before we left home but then could not log back into it! One of our cruising friends, more tech saavy than most of us, finally discovered that my Internet Explorer had some setting/firewall that was blocking my log on. He downloaded Mozilla Firefox and I was able to log right into the Blog. I thought that it was lost somewhere in the "blogasphere" forever!
We left St. Simon's on Jun 4th after a whirlwind of getting a contract on our home in Fayetteville, GA, on Apr 25th, packing things for storage and for the trip, having a garage sale, finishing pending real estate business with my partner, Portia, and closing on the house on May 30th. There is much more than "lifting the lines from the dock" to leave on this adventure. We're still not certain how we accomplished so much in such a short time.
After figuring out the logistics of where to leave vehicles and still get to the marina, plans began to fall in to place. Online banking helps tremendously to pay bills and there are a few less to pay since we have no utility bills this year. We use a mail forwarding service from FL so most mail is sent from GA to FL and then we call for a "mail drop" at some marina that we know that we can be at within a week or so. That has gone much smoother this year. Think about what you would do if suddenly you were going to be away from home for months at a time - life goes on and somehow you must keep up with it. Last year I didn't know where to start first - notifying insurance, magazines, banks, newspapers, organizations that I belonged to to change the address and contact information..................but somehow it all got done.
A big thank you to my brother Chuck and wife Nancy who met us at Golden Isles Marina, St. Simon's Jun 2nd. They drove our car back to SC to store it, along with our motorcycle and trailer while we are gone. We had lots of rain from storm Barry which did not make their trip pleasant. Barry delayed our departure a day, as well, so we left on Jun 4th.
Jun is late to start the Loop so we knew that we would travel as quickly as we could, to be in New York City as close to mid-Jun as possible. Except for a bit of a rough start of running "the outside" (in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Inter-Coastal Waterway) from St. Simon's to Harbour Town, Hilton Head Island, SC, we have had good weather most all of the time.
We had a following sea with 3' - 4' rollers all day, with an occasional larger wave. This is a very difficult point of travel for the Captain because it is more difficult to handle the boat. Even the auto pilot doesn't like it so Rich worked most all day. We arrived in Harbour Town pretty bushed, however safe. Once snug in the harbor, Reggie got a good walk, we fixed a bite to eat, hosed the boat off some and got some rest, for tomorrow was another day!
Harbour Town is a lovely place, which we had visited last year on our return to GA. It's very picturesque with condos, restaurants and shops. Many enjoy bike riding and golf. I encourage you to consider this for a visit.
