Season #5 Port Charlotte, Florida Nov. 5, 2017

It’s been a month since we bid farewell to Maine. We had lived in our cabin on Bottle Lake since May 10, 2017... our boat tucked high and dry in a covered bay in a boat yard on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It had been a summer of visits with Erin, Brett, Emily, Bailey and Cupcake... both at Lakeville and Orono.

Great fun every time. Dad’s camp got its stately new underpinnings last fall; now it looks even more more spiffy with its new steel roof and restored southern pine floors. The front porch has skylights worked into the steel roof and a great one-piece floor covering that looks like natural stone.

Snazzy! The neglected woodshed was re-purposed into a sturdy storage building for winter storage of the grill, the bicycle built-for-two, lawn mowers and garden tools. 

Eighteen family members and close friends gathered each evening over the supper meals during the week that Val, Rick and Venessa and friend Fred, 98 and 92 years young, paid us their yearly visit.

Since we left, Kevin, Kyle, Joe and Tylar have replaced the old hemlock logs in the dock cribbing with fresh timbers. Looks amazing! Dad would be tickled with all the improvements. Cheryl did a great job capturing the rebuild on camera so the whole family could revel in the moment.

Joe, Tylar, Kyle and Kevin

Wally’s mother turned 98 in September. She continues to be well-cared for by the loving staff of the Sweet Seniors Guest Home in East Millinocket.

Cruiser friends with a family retreat on the coast invited us to join them... two times! Our long-time friend Carole, whose interest in our blog has become legendary, brought her dull knife collection to our cabin.

After a leisurely tour of the improvements of the O’Brien/Campbell compound, she returned home with a dozen sharp knives. How great is that? Gardening fell to Wally this summer. His daily crop care paid off with great fresh produce.

Somehow Wally and I managed to fit in a 10-day motorcycle trip, touring clock-wise around Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula in August. Breath-taking scenery... mountainsides to the right, expanses of the St. Lawrence Seaway to the left with tiny hamlets nestled in the scalloped coastline. French was the language of choice of the Quebecois. We managed to find food, restrooms and fuel, despite our inability to even begin to master their language. Luckily we had booked our overnights on-line...in English!

Emily and Bailey may have started a new end-of-summer tradition... a “S’Mores and More Party” at Dad’s camp for the Windy Shores Road camp owners. The “More” was campfire pies... m-m-m. The response from the girls’ hand-delivered invitations was heart-warming. It was a social moment that was long over-due.

Wayne,Chick,Ellen Monika,Betty,Lynn,Lois

We had a flurry of visits as we moved south... every one of them a treat. Family in MA, Cruisers in VA, two weeks with our Black Mountain Home for Children family, two couples from our Saudi days in NC, family in Myrtle Beach, SC, RVers from our Benson, AZ Co-op days and Bottle Lake neighbors here in FL. We even shocked ourselves by springing for tickets to a sold-out Eagles concert at the 18,000-seat Greensboro, NC Coliseum.

The recently departed Glenn Frey would have been blown away by the stellar performances of his remaining band members along with guest singer Vince Gill and Glenn’s own 22 year-old son Deacon.  The NC State Fair the next day in nearby Raleigh was incredible as well.

We’ve been living aboard Summertime “on the hard”... perched up on dry land... in Port Charlotte, FL since October 21st. Hurricane Irma passed over this area on Sept. 10th roaring along at 125 mph. Not a boat here at Safe Cove Boat Yard with its covered bays suffered damage!  Thank you Lord!

I’d love to say that we take delight in making the entrances and exits to and from Summertime from a wobbly 6-foot step ladder... but I can’t. It’s a pain in the neck and it doesn’t get better over time. We are also expected to capture all our dishwater and bodily fluids and deposit them at the bathroom halfway across the boat yard. Yuck! Despite these difficulties, Wally has managed to sand and paint the expansive bottom of our trawler. I did my best to “keep his courage up” while dealing with a Polymyalgia Rheumatica symptoms break-through. The muscle misery came back with a vengeance when I inadvertently missed taking one 1 mg tablet one night and it took 7 days to recover...Ahhhhh!  Now we are back in business working together on cleaning, buffing and waxing the hull and the stainless rail. Summertime verily glistens. With our boat insurance due for renewal, we have a required out-of-water boat survey scheduled for next week. We are working to have our Kadey-Krogen Manatee ship-shape from engine room to pilot house, aft deck to master stateroom, by that time. Whew!  

In our spare time, Wally and I have been assessing what our future endeavors might be. We have been looking at late model RVs that would, #1, let us travel comfortably and,#2, be equally comfortable for Erin’s family to travel in on our “off-season”. The recently created 31-foot bunkhouse models with a queen-size walk-around bed is very appealing to us. 

It’s now November 5th, 2017. We continue to follow our eating plan. I am holding at a 15 lb. loss and Wally just reached his goal of 40 lb. loss after 195 days. Everything we eat is written down and calories tallied... it keeps us honest and on the downward swing. We feel great!