Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout my tight pants.

Not that I should be complaining about the South Carolinian temperature when our home contingent is still shoveling out from the foot of snow they got two days ago, but walking into a hotel last night in flip flops and shorts and waking up to 36 degrees was a cold slap in the face that we aren’t quite ready for. As we wrenched jeans on for the first time with some mild discomfort, Andy and I got this gem stuck in our heads, so you’re all welcome for that. It sure is a hard transition after wearing skirts with elastic waistbands for two months. Ah well, somehow we’ll survive, but you can now picture the survival soundtrack of the day: “..got my tight paa-aants on!”

We left Indiantown on Tuesday after a whirlwind morning and early afternoon of hauling, putting Chickadee to bed, and packing the car. We’ve honed a lot of our processes, but it’s still a lot of semi-depressing grunt work while trying to keep the kids entertained. Thankfully, they’re pretty good at finding things to do, including creating new vehicles out of the scooters borrowed from Ruach’s car:

After a little weeping on the way out, we drove west to Naples to visit Andy’s sister and her horse Torry, the star of the Naples show in the eyes of the girls. We visited, got some very necessary hair cuts, and had an afternoon ride. Violet’s face was stuck in the best permagrin for her time on Torry; she could barely talk she was so excited to be up there. Lily has had a bit more experience and reacquainted herself with her riding confidence quickly, all the while Torry dutifully plodded around, wishing for dinner. (I was doing much the same.)

As Andy and I are the tortoises to Lily and Violet’s hares for the trip north, our slow northward movement is only tolerable for the girls if we pepper it with excitement. (Lily starts most sentences since we’ve been in the car with “I cannot wait to get to Maine.”.) Plan #1 was a visit to see Winter, the Dolphin Tale-famous dolphin at her home at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. (The movie is about her story of rescue and subsequent rehab after losing her tail to a crab pot line’s tight wrap. Release wasn’t an option since she was so young when she was found, so Clearwater is her forever home.) It was SUCH a great stop; not only does paying an entrance fee to a rescue and rehab center feel much better than that to a zoo or aquarium, but  we really were all a bit starstruck in seeing Winter herself. Who knew? Watching these [often] cheesy movies with the girls does hit the important feels!

The girls also had the opportunity to feed a resident river otter. Who doesn’t want to feed a river otter?! (Hmm..)

We spent the afternoon on Clearwater beach, our last bit of sand for a long while. To ensure that they were maximizing the sand to hair exposure rating, Lily and Violet spent much of their time rolling in it. Lily’s thick curly hair is a natural habitat for full fledged dunes, and one of her favorite past times on the boat (and for the subsequent weeks that follow) is to scratch sand out of her scalp and watch me roll my eyes in disgust. To boost her ‘talent’, one of her friends wrote her a note that ask her to bring some Bahamian sand home, and followed up to point out that she could transport in her hair. Nice toilette, kid.

Future plans include a brief stopover in Annapolis, and then a visit with cousins in Baltimore. Slowly we go.

As our tans fade and our layers increase, the end is near. Anxieties from home responsibilities creep in and out with the knowledge that a lot will be piled onto our plates when we walk through the door, but lessened too with the comfort of an easier framework of land-based tasks. Simpler yet less simple all at the same time. The stabilizing mental image I give myself is always a seed; our wonderfully condensed, concentrated form of life onboard is slowly unfurled and subsequently intertwined with the necessary roots and branches that fill out the spaces of our Southwest Harbor lives. One begets the next, and we are thanking our lucky stars to be living in this loop.