Happy Tuesday! This past week has been a little crazy, as we traveled from NC visiting my parents on our way home from AZ, drove from there to Deltaville, VA to get the boat, and then motored back to Norfolk (our home port) in hopes of getting the boat fixed and back to sailing. Talk about moving around! However, they were all places that have felt like home — familiar. So, it’s nice to be back in a space where we know our neighbors and the marina folks. It does feel like we’re home again after lots of travels, even though home is truly wherever the boat is, or wherever we are together (cheesy, I know).
The trip back to Norfolk was beautiful. We started on Friday around 2pm, and got to Mobjack Bay around 7pm. We let out the anchor, grabbed our blankets and books, and enjoyed every bit of the fall air and the sunset. Buoy snuggled in next to my legs and we read until the sun was below the horizon. There’s nothing quite like that view. We slept until about 3:30am, well, I did. Steve only slept for a couple of hours, then worked on his computer, and then tried to sleep some more and failed, so he woke me up and we left again! As we set out, we could see a faint line of the Milky Way. Steve got out his phone and pulled up the stargazing app so we could check out all the constellations. Talk about beauty. We were in absolute awe of the world at 4am. We took shifts sleeping and napping, tucked under blankets and wearing our sweats and toboggans. The sun rose and it was warm again. We cranked up some music and jammed all the way to the marina.
Our one want when we got back was breakfast from Klassic Doughnuts, a homemade donut food truck that is at the farmer’s market every Saturday. So naturally we drove 5 minutes to the market, waited in line, got our donuts and some kombucha, and left. We ate them on the drive home, of course, and absolutely passed out when we got back to the boat. Sleep deprivation had won and we napped for another three hours. It was a wild journey, but it was a beautiful one.
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I think we are going to miss the adventure of new places and new things this month while we’re stuck with no sails and we’re on the hard, but I have no doubt we’ll find adventures along the way, some familiar and some new. After all, living on a boat in general is an adventure, because you really never know what the next day is going to bring, or should I say break?
Something exciting did happen, that I absolutely love Steve Cooke for: Our oven and stove are officially working! After using the Coleman double burner since June we FINALLY have a full kitchen! That’s right, we even have REFRIGERATION. We bought an Alpicool cooler that doubles as a refrigerator and freezer. We are SO pumped. I’m so thankful for Steve because he worked all day Sunday on getting the stove hooked up so that we could cook on it that night. And man oh man are we LOVING it, and the cooler too!
We are back in the swing of things with lots and lots of things on our to do list, such as replacing the hatches and the portholes, removing and redoing the boat striping, mending the tears in the bimini, fixing the broken step in the companionway, adding the starboard side netting, and of course, getting the stay replaced.
It’s a lot, but we’ll get through it. I’m just lucky that we’re here, we made it safely, and things are looking up. Life is good, everyone, life is good.
THIS WEEK (in photos):
Mentally Sailing 