We’re baaaaack!

After a whirlwind of weeks that included birthdays, holidays, houseguests, mini trips, basketball games, swim meets, piano lessons, art classes and work projects and deadlines, we find ourselves once again crammed in the car heading southbound!

While the temperature reads 8 degrees at the moment, I can’t say that I’m sad to be heading somewhere with a lot more degrees in the near future. While the snow is beautiful and all of us love playing in it, you know what else is nice? Warm sand. And face skin that doesn’t hurt on windy walks. (I will miss my brown walking companion, however. The boat isn’t quite big enough for our Olive, so she’s luxuriating in her winter home with her winter family.)

Andy and I are semi-mute on this first leg, trying to process what we’ve likely forgotten and the subsequent ramifications, and also a slow unfurling of mental lists of tasks left to do both remotely for work, and physically on Chickadee in a few short days. When we’ve cleared the state line and have a bit of distance under our belt I’ll grab a pad and become our scribe, putting ideas to paper to formulate the best plan of attack for our work upon arrival.

This is the first year where Andy didn’t go down ahead of time to do major projects on the boat, and while that had some cost savings for us, it increases the work load and stress level to know that the magic ‘boat put together fairy’ isn’t going to have the dodger up, large items stored and dealt with, the cushions wrangled back into their very complicated slip covers and the general time-consuming drudgery of waking our sleeping girl up.

First stop for us is only a ‘hop’ down the road; we’ll stay in Portland tonight so that Lily can swim in a meet tomorrow morning nearby.  We’ll then pack Torpedo Allen into the car and point our nose to Indiantown. Here’s to hoping we make it to the hotel’s free happy hour in time!