Launch - Season 5 already??

Monday: Dinner with Susan's daughter and her family.  Tuesday: Dinner with Jeff's son in Eastern Ontario.  Wednesday: Cross the boarder and dinner with Jeff's daughter and her boyfriend in Virginia, Thursday: Dinner with Joe & Connie on their boat in St. Augustine.  Friday/Saturday: A visit to the Kennedy Space Centre.  Sunday:  Lunch with friends Cindy and Grant.  That's how our road trip to our boat progressed.  Awesome.  Hop, skip and jumping from family and friends.

Lunch with Grant and Cindy (M/V As the Crow Flies)

We squeezed in a visit to The Kennedy Space Centre, which was just so awe inspiring, from the miracles of engineering, to the reminders of the vastness of the universe and just how wee teeny tiny we are in it. We highly recommend it. It even made me teary-eyed with awe a few times (I'm a bit of a suck that way).

We did things a little differently with the boat launch this year.  Normally, we have the yard move the boat from the storage yard into the work yard so we can prepare it for habitation, paint the bottom etc.  This year, we thought what the heck.  The bottom didn't need to be painted and knowing that the boat would be nasty dirty, we skipped a step and launched right from the storage yard into the water, saving us a bunch of boat yard charges.  It was a little bit of a hard core move, but whatever.

We spent a quiet night at Glades dock, making sure nothing was leaking.  The next morning, over a peaceful coffee in the cockpit, we looked up and noticed a small gator, quietly gliding along in the morning mist.  Yep, we're back in central Florida!

We moved our very dirty and not-fit-for-habitation boat down the Caloosahatchee River to a marina in a lovely park (Franklin Lock Marina) and began the clean up.  It wasn't too bad of an experience - except for a few freak-out encounters with stow-away frogs - and it saved us a bunch of money, which we will justify by taking ourselves out for a nice meal or two sometime.

There always seems to be one of these guys floating
around when one stops on the Okeechobee

We'll spend a week or so in Fort Myers to finish the clean-up/organization and provision the boat.  From there...  we be boatin'