The adventure begins.

Our original plan was to start the trip with a blog entry about the pre-departure prep, but instead we left a day early, so here we go with all of it, hopefully in condensed form! We moved out of our house and aboard the boat on August 1st. Partly because we had planned a northern trip for August that never materialized, and partly because our former neighbors, Dave and Kathy Keperling were looking for a solution to their living situation (house in VA and job in PA) and offered to house sit while we went sailing.

This gave us plenty of time to get ready to head south, but we still had projects going right down to the wire! We still carved out time to make a quick trip north last weekend to visit kids and grandkids. It included a trip to the Keene (NH) Pumpkin Festival Saturday, with both Sam and Katherine's families. We also cheered Katherine on while she ran a 5K race on Sunday. We hurried back to the boat to take delivery of several (Annapolis) boat show buys and worked on installations and upgrades, etc.

Yesterday we drove into DC to visit with Julie and her family. The day included soccer drills for all three girls, an afternoon at Turtle Park (while Grace attended a birthday party there), and two yummy meals out and about town. Well, we had had our grandchildren fix, it was time to go!

This morning we left our slip at Lippincott Marina at Kent Narrows at 9:00 am, and headed for the Wye River for a Bloody Mary rendezvous with Phil and Kate Pennington, neighbors from Spring Grove who share the love of the Bay and the love of BMs! We passed several CCYC friends on our way up the river, and received good wishes and bon voyage from all.

We decided to eat into the long trip to Solomon's that was scheduled for tomorrow and left the Wye around 1:30 pm, headed to... we weren't sure. As we headed down Eastern Bay we decided to stop at Knapps Narrows for the night. We called to marina there and were told that there just wasn't any water! Soooo - we headed out into the Bay and set a course for the Little Choptank River. We finally dropped the hook in Hudson Creek at 9:00 pm. We were able to sail some of the time, but true to form, the wind was on the nose for a good bit of the way! We had a LATE supper and are ready for bed!

~~~_/)~~~ Martha & Dan

Katherine, Kinsey and Zoe marvel at just a few of the 27,000 carved pumpkins on display at the Keene Pumpkin Festival. We got VIP parking thanks to Whitney (Carlson) and Scott Ryan

The Hinckleys, Jess, Sam, Oliver and Ben pose among the pumpkins.

We pose with Zoe and Kinsey along the Connecticut River while Katherine ran her 5K.

The Padula girls, Alice, Grace and Clare are ready for soccer drills.

This may not be the best sunset picture I've taken, but I had to include it because I was able to identify the silhouetted sailboat ("Mai Toi", a 49' pleasure craft) with AIS (Automatic Identification System). It is just one of the new toys, um, I mean improvements, added to Brunelle. (Dan LOVES his AIS)