Well, this is it, the moment we've been working towards. We have a boat, our home in Minnesota is sold, Dawn quit her job, I transferred to Atlanta and am in a good position to drop my work schedule to a minimum this winter, and as of this morning we moved out of our temporary apartment in St. Paul. This was our intermediate step between 2500 sq. ft. house and 200 sq. ft. boat. In the last two weeks we've sold or given away our remaining furniture, stored some household goods we'll want whenever we return, donated all other household goods and many of our clothes, and ended up with eight or nine boxes to pack in the back of our Xterra to bring to the boat in South Carolina.
I'm still flying a full schedule so I only had two days off to help Dawn pack all this up and clean the apartment. We unintentionally slept in a bit this morning so I didn't help with the final cleaning as much as I intended, it took a while to load up the last boxes headed for our storage unit, and I ended up at the airport a bit later than planned. No biggie, I made my commuter flight and got down to my new base airport of Atlanta in plenty of time. I'm in Austin tonight, West Palm Beach tomorrow, and Kansas City on Sunday night. After my trip is over on Monday I'll be flying to Indianapolis, where Dawn will meet me so we can drive the rest of the way to SC together. We're hoping to do a bit of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail along the way, and should arrive in Charleston on Nov 2nd.
We're not actually moving onto Windbird right away. She's still on the hard, obviously, with the rig down and the chainplates being replaced, with some attendant cabinetry dust and general boatyard grime. Living without refrigeration, water or plumbing presents its own difficulties. But mostly it's the idea of hauling Piper up and down a 12 foot ladder that is dissuading us. Judy mentioned that she lived on the hard with a small pup once, hauling her up and down the ladder in a sack. We tested that idea out with Piper in Minnesota and...yeah, it didn't go well. So we found a dog-friendly VRBO in Isle of Palms for $490 a week, and will live there the first week at least. There really aren't that many things we need to get done before splashing Windbird, but I figure we should take full advantage of the time she's in the boatyard to get projects done that might be harder in the water - and being there every day will allow me to supervise the boatyard's work. Leigh Jones will be coming down from Myrtle Beach to help with the radome, masthead transducer, and thru-hull transducer installation, and I'll likely do the initial installation on the Garmin chartplotter. But once the boatyard work is done we'll be heading back up to Myrtle Beach so Leigh and Rico can replace the rest of the lightning-fried equipment, and Dawn and I can get the rest of the boat ready to head south to Florida and the Bahamas in January and February.
I'm still flying a full schedule so I only had two days off to help Dawn pack all this up and clean the apartment. We unintentionally slept in a bit this morning so I didn't help with the final cleaning as much as I intended, it took a while to load up the last boxes headed for our storage unit, and I ended up at the airport a bit later than planned. No biggie, I made my commuter flight and got down to my new base airport of Atlanta in plenty of time. I'm in Austin tonight, West Palm Beach tomorrow, and Kansas City on Sunday night. After my trip is over on Monday I'll be flying to Indianapolis, where Dawn will meet me so we can drive the rest of the way to SC together. We're hoping to do a bit of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail along the way, and should arrive in Charleston on Nov 2nd.
We're not actually moving onto Windbird right away. She's still on the hard, obviously, with the rig down and the chainplates being replaced, with some attendant cabinetry dust and general boatyard grime. Living without refrigeration, water or plumbing presents its own difficulties. But mostly it's the idea of hauling Piper up and down a 12 foot ladder that is dissuading us. Judy mentioned that she lived on the hard with a small pup once, hauling her up and down the ladder in a sack. We tested that idea out with Piper in Minnesota and...yeah, it didn't go well. So we found a dog-friendly VRBO in Isle of Palms for $490 a week, and will live there the first week at least. There really aren't that many things we need to get done before splashing Windbird, but I figure we should take full advantage of the time she's in the boatyard to get projects done that might be harder in the water - and being there every day will allow me to supervise the boatyard's work. Leigh Jones will be coming down from Myrtle Beach to help with the radome, masthead transducer, and thru-hull transducer installation, and I'll likely do the initial installation on the Garmin chartplotter. But once the boatyard work is done we'll be heading back up to Myrtle Beach so Leigh and Rico can replace the rest of the lightning-fried equipment, and Dawn and I can get the rest of the boat ready to head south to Florida and the Bahamas in January and February.
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