A Fitting Beginning

We flew from Seattle to New York City (JFK), then to Norfolk, Virginia, which had us flying down the east coast, site of part of our future Great Loop adventure.

Oh, that’s right – we haven’t confirmed on this blog our plans for a next Great Adventure!  Four years ago Cathryn made friends via the internet with a man named Mark – long story how this came about, so we’ll save it for later when we actually meet him, which hasn’t happened yet.  Suffice it to say that Mark dreams of someday doing The Great Loop, a 6,000-mile loop journey by boat, covering the eastern Atlantic, northern Great Lakes, midwest rivers and the Gulf of Mexico. His passion for the idea and our subsequent research inspired us to do it. We currently think we’ll start this journey sometime in 2012 on a boat yet to be purchased, somewhere along The Great Loop route (Google it if you’ve never heard of it; until Mark mentioned it and got us all enthused, we’d never heard of it either). 

So . . . now we’re on our way to a Great Loop Rendezvous, a 4-day seminar conducted by America’s Great Loop Association, and which includes people currently doing The Loop (by boat), and those planning to do The Loop in the future, like us.  We’ll stay at a hotel in Norfolk, Virginia, next door to a  marina where folks currently underway will stay on their boats and offer boat tours to those of us considering buying “the perfect Great Loop boat”. 

So flying south from New York City to Norfolk, we spent an hour over the east coast, including Delaware Sound and Chesapeake Bay, two bodies of water we’ll navigate when we actually do The Great Loop, as well as a lot of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.  It was a beautiful, sunny, blue sky day, and the waters (seen from 16,000 feet in the sky) looked calm and enchanting. The coastline swirled all over the place.  Enough about that.

We landed in Norfolk yesterday and spent today touring Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown, two historic sites established in the 1600s when the British first colonized North America.  Both were interesting sites with restorations and reconstructions, period-costume attired staff, and re-enactments of various period events . .  .  a great way to spend the day for history buffs.

Tonight we’re in Charlottesville, Virginia, and plan to visit Jefferson’s Monticello in the morning, then we’ll  back-track east to the Delmarva Peninsula. Meanwhile, we had a delicious dinner at a gourmet hamburger joint adjacent to the University of Virginia campus, where students appear more homogenous and more like youthful versions of who they will be in their later years than students we’re accustomed to watching at places near the University of Washington and University of Colorado. We sat at an outside table next to the sidewalk in 75+ degree, sunny weather with a beer and good food. Bob (actually both of us) is happy. It was still cloudy, rainy and in the 50s when we left home yesterday.