I truly apologize for the big gap in blog posts. Wifi can be sketchy and vacation is first and foremost, vacation. It's hard to fit everything in. LOL Pictures coming as soon as I can.....
Dan and I spent the day being lazy our first day in TC. Hah! We cleaned and straightened the boat from top to bottom. Dan washed us down, filled our water and cleaned our inflatable. I vacuumed and dusted and cleaned our bathrooms and changed our bedding.
We had a nice lunch on the boat and people watched for a bit. Early afternoon I decided to get the kinks out and decided to walk to the grocery store. Tom's Market is about a two and a half mile walk West from the boat. It was pleasantly warm and sunny.
As I walked along the Tart Trail, (get that reference to cherries? It stands for) I saw quite a few hammocks strung between trees. They use straps so they don't mark the trees. There must have been close to a dozen. Some were occupied and some of the owners were down at the beach. It is so nice along here that they didn't give in to pressure and build along the shore. It is all public space for quite a few miles. It's just beautiful.
My walk was fruitful, no food; but I did get some soap and spray and wash so I could do some laundry. I was able to wash some sheets and towels. Our washer and dryer are small; but boy are they handy.
I got back to the boat and our friends Jeff and Rebecca were tied up across the way from us. They used to dock at Island Cove. Dan has known them for years. They winter in Florida and summer on their boat in Michigan. They were in TC for the Traverse City Film Festival.
They have a Carver 46 aft cabin.
It's amazing how much more space and storage that had on their boat compared to our Carver 396. I guess a foot wider and six feet longer makes a BIG difference. Dan tells me that our present boat and there present boat are built on the same hull. He says that the difference between our boat is that ours is a ranch and there's is a quad level. LOL
Jeff got a tour of our boat and we went over to tour their's. We stayed and chatted a bit and then walked to dinner with them. They recommended dinner at Brady's. We had the house special, broasted chicken. Yum! That was probably our latest night so far on the trip.
We slept in on Tuesday. I worked on the blog and cleaning out my email folder. Always full of junk. We had a late breakfast and then we took our dinghy out for a ride. After two days of blowing and decent size waves the lake had finally calmed down. We cruised up the West side of the bay and then crossed over to the East and came on back down the mission Peninsula side. We admired all the huge houses along that side.
We saw this guy out in the bay.
The Manitou charters two hour tours of the bay.
We got back to the boat and got ourselves ready to go visiting. My stepmom Mary is in town for a week at her timeshare at Pinestead Reef. We packed up our bikes and headed back out onto the Tart Trail. This time we were going East. Pinestead is across from Traverse City State Park. Our ride to the condo was eventful. I got us a little detoured and added a mile or two to our trip. It took us about fifty minutes to get there vs thirty five minutes on the way back. We're think we rode about twelve total miles.
Mary's condo was having its weekly resident potluck and we stayed for dinner. Mary's contribution was a beautiful, tasty marble cake from Sam's Club. The potluck had lots of delicious contributions. We met Mary's friends Ed and Sharon and enjoyed their company as well. They are snowbirds too. We had a nice visit with Mary.
We left Mary's place about 7:30 and rode back to the marina. It is really wonderful to see how well the Trail system is used. Walkers, dog walkers, runners, skate boarders, cyclists and families use the trail consistently. If you build them, they will come.
Clinch Park was busy, busy when we got back. Right next to the marina they set up an outdoor movie screen. Bands played for the crowds while everyone waited for dusk and the movie to start. Sunday's movie was a documentary on the Talking Heads. Monday's movie was Talledegha Nights with Will Farrell. There were vendors selling popcorn, lemonade, ice cream and more.
We people watched a bit and were just getting ready to turn in when this giant catamaran came into the marina.
We'd seen him out on the water earlier in the day with these huge frames mounted on the front of the boat. It turned out that he was doing a movie screening. We watched as a parade of people walked down the dock and boarded.
Off to bed we went; we are the early to bed early to rise boaters. Hahaha, this reminded me about something Jeff said about boaters. "You are either a boater, or a floater." Which means if you move your boat and use it; you can call yourself a boater. If you just sit at the dock, you are a floater.
Tomorrow is an up and at em day, we are moving to Petoskey.
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