Reality Hits Us Between the Eyes

Sunday, June 28

Another early morning and more work.  Dan finished up the air conditioner yesterday.  Today he tackled the refrigerator. As I mentioned previously; this fridge is shorter than the old one.  We needed to make a decision about its vertical placement.  Dan favored centering it in the opening. I wanted to put it up as high as possible.  I felt it would be less stooping and bending to get things out of it.  It would also be easier to fill in a space at the bottom rather than trying to fill both top and bottom openings.

Dan agreed with me about the fridge placement and finished the installation. He was now two for two. The air conditioner and refrigerator were both installed. Now he could move on to work on the bridge. When we sea trialed our boat we knew we were going to have to replace the engine gages.  Dan hoped that they would be plug and play. Yay!  This was the first project that went smoothly.  We can now read our RPMs, our fuel consumption, our battery voltage and engine temperatures.

Our original plan was to leave Jacksonville on Monday, June 29.  About noon on Sunday we realized that wasn’t even a possibility. We still had tubs and boxes everywhere and the truck was still about a third full.  I hadn’t been to the grocery store and we still needed fuel and a shakedown cruise. I was making progress on the cleaning and Dan had started to clean up on the bridge; but there was still so much to be done.

We made the decision to leave on Tuesday, June 30.  Whew, the pressure was off somewhat.

We decided to make another trip to West Marine. On Saturday it had rained buckets. We found out that our bimini top leaked like a sieve. We needed to waterproof it asap.  We bought two bottles of 303 Fabric Guard to do the job.  Now we just needed six hours of sun to apply it.  We also picked up some fender lines and a pair of gloves for me.  I would need them to handle lines in the locks in New York.

We also made a pilgrimage to Costco. We picked up some beef, bottled water, some pulled pork for dinner and seven bottles of wine. I was good to go for the next couple weeks. We had packed some beer in the cooler before we left home.  I was glad that I had packed some Bud Light as well as Bud.  I’d been cooling off with a Bud Light the past few evenings. It was going to be good to open that first bottle of wine.

Sunday night was the first time we actually had a chance to sit down and enjoy a few minutes on the new boat. It was wonderful. We were very excited to start our trip home.  I think the excitement was tempered with equal parts of apprehension and nerves.