Day 302: Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Port to Port: Kingston, NY
Underway: 0:00 am Motor Off: 0:00 pm Miles Traveled: 0 Stayed At: Marina
First Things First: First time we have rafted up with another boat.
Mile to Mile: No rain today. What a treat. When you look at the national weather map, the entire country is devoid of clouds and weather except the eastern seaboard. It looks like we will have a reprieve tomorrow too so all the July 4th festivities will be rain free. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.
Today was moving day. We needed to move back and raft off of Spiritus to make room for some boats with reservations for the Fourth. We decided to take down our mast and get it ready for the next month and a half of canals. This went surprisingly easy and we had the mast tied down in its supports and all the cables bundled up before 9 am. Aurora always looks forlorn with her mast down – kind of like a really slow powerboat. We won’t put her back together until we get past Severn, Ontario sometime in August.
After our big move, we decided to wander over to our favorite diner – the Rainbow Café (today’s word-of-the- day happened to be “rainbow”) for the breakfast special with Spiritus – and by the time we left, two other couples joined us and a third couple showed up after we got there. We ended up having a leisurely almost 2 hour breakfast and gab session before heading back to the marina. We are really lucky to be “stranded” with such a great group of boaters.
We joined Eddy and Linda again in the afternoon and hitched a ride with Ron up to the grocery store where we stocked up on all the essentials for our Looper Fourth of July celebration tomorrow. We are having a potluck BBQ and it looks like we won’t have to eat for a week given all the food people are planning to bring. The bus system here is borderline useless – it only runs on the hour and that assumes that the driver isn’t taking a break somewhere. So we walked home – I don’t recommend carrying 20 ears of sweet corn and a watermelon home from the store but you do what you have to do. My shoulders will feel it tomorrow.
We got an update on the Erie Canal (during docktails, of course). The newest official update is that most of the system will reopen soon and the portion with the worst damage “might” open as soon as next Friday. This kind of fuzzy information makes planning really a challenge. We would really prefer to go the Erie Canal route – it is a lot faster and shorter and easier for us than going all the way into Canada and back down. Right now we plan to leave on Sunday but we may push that out to Monday to wait for a little more information, after the holiday weekend, to see how much progress they make. We won’t know for sure until we actually get going. Tomorrow will no doubt be a new story.