Friends, Rain and Provisioning

Just as we found during the 3 winters we lived in an RV in Baja, Mexico, people who travel by boat are far from home, family and friends, so they reach out to others nearby who are living the same way they are.

Friday night Cort and Beth on “Turtles IV” invited everyone to docktails adjacent to their boat, and 25 people showed up, including us. We met lots of new folks, most of whom we’ll never see again as we leave here in two weeks, but it’s  interesting to compare the where-we’ve-been-and-where-we’re-going stories, see each other’s boats and discuss solutions to common problems. 

Last night we were invited for happy hour on Richard and Wendy’s boat across the dock from us – lively, interesting folks from Ottawa, Canada who live on their beautiful boat  half the year and in a house in Ottawa other times.

In other fun, we took our last 5-mile walk to the Saturday Farmer’s Market in downtown Fort Pierce.  In the photo above is Cathryn, running off with another man. Actually he is an 82-year-old guy who told us about running his first marathon 3 years ago, at 79! Always on the lookout for role models we hope to have the good fortune to emulate.

We also finally stopped in at the Manatee Museum on our way back, a small museum mostly targeted at kids, it seemed to us, but a nice break in the A/C during our otherwise hot walk.

We’re getting emails from people about rain. Bob’s sister Lynn back home says it’s raining, raining, raining there. Friend Gene is currently in an RV in Arizona but is headed to Kauai, Hawaii in a couple weeks and says they had 35 inches of rain there last WEEKEND, and roads and bridges were washed out.

And it’s raining here on the east coast of Florida, harder than the gentle  showers we’re accustomed to at home. We have to remember to close all the hatches and ports firmly before we go to bed or we’ll have to clean up another interior flood. On the other hand, we got a text message from daughter Adrienne yesterday telling us she and her fiancee Justin were on a ski mountain in Colorado eating lunch in t-shirts! What’s with that???

We’ve begun provisioning the boat for the true beginning of our Loop. While there will be grocery stores along the way of course, we won’t have a car so will be shopping on foot or bicycle, and the nearby grocery stores will often be small  Mom-and-Pop type places with limited selection.

So Friday we went to Publix and spent $537 on toilet paper, paper towels, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo and soap, canned soup and tuna, rice and lentils, jars of pasta sauce and anything else we have room to store and know won’t spoil.

We hope this will last us to the Chesapeake Bay where we know we’ll be near convenient, big grocery stores again. It took two shopping carts to get us out of there, and it felt like a scavenger hunt trying to find suitable storage space for all of it once we got it back to the boat.