Sunday, October 14, 2012

Away From the Boat

Friday morning, another rainy one (!), was spent doing chores and packing for our time away from the boat. Rick, an air conditioner expert, came to the boat to assess the type and size of new compressor needed to fix our ailing a/c unit. He’ll make the repair next week while we’re in Rogersville after ordering what’s needed.

We dropped Lynn and David at the Huntsville airport, entered Cathryn’s parents address in our GPS, and discovered it’s 772 miles to get there, not the 600 miles we expected. Wow!  Good thing we have enough time to cover the extra road miles.

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Traveling southeast for 4 hours by car from Huntsville to Jackson, Mississippi we crossed the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which we’ll travel starting week after next on our boat, headed for Mobile. It was fun to get our first  glimpse  from the bridge on the highway. It looked calm and easy.

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We spent the night in Jackson, Mississippi, and Saturday morning sighted the Mississippi River near New Orleans. We traveled 200 miles of this river in September after leaving Chicago, headed southbound. It looked much the same down here in terms of width and busy tow-barge traffic, but it had 40-foot high concrete levees protecting the adjacent land from flooding, something we didn’t see up north.

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Late Saturday afternoon we picked up our daughter and son-in-law Matt and Mackenzie who flew in from Seattle, and drove to Cathryn’s parents home in Houston where we’ll spend three nights. It’s hot here – 88 degrees and higher humidity!

It felt pretty weird to be traveling 70 mph on average, instead of 40-70 miles per day on the boat!

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