Full Circle

Location: Green Cove Springs, Florida
Position: N 29 59.091 W 081 38.894

After a great three months of visiting family and friends up and down the eastern US Wanda has finally delivered us back to Rachel. It's been a great summer filled with spending quality time with our grandkids, families and friends interspersed with sightseeing. 

Wanda has performed beautifully, carrying us and all our gear over 14,000 miles this summer with no breakdowns and no problems at all. What a great car she's been – we couldn't be happier with her!

 We watched Jeseph, Tigerlily and Baylen surfing, and we all had fun camping. We got to see Alex AND Emma play football and took them for an overnight sailing trip visiting at our old haunts on Claytor Lake. We enjoyed a nice long visit with Mark's mom and some of his New England family and hooked up with a high school buddy of Mark's who he had not seen for about 15 years. And we met up with some Canadian cruising friends in Niagara Falls.

We did a couple of house sitting stints, too. One in Blacksburg giving us chance to spiff up the garden at our house, and one in Floyd County near the Blue Ridge Parkway, where Mark used to live, giving us the chance to re-connect with old friends there too. When it was time to head south from Virginia we meandered our way back down to Florida taking 3 weeks and visiting Mark's brother & sister-in-law and numerous cruising friends along the way.

We were rather apprehensive about how Rachel would look after sitting in the yard in the hot, muggy Florida climate all summer. We're happy to report that she fared very well, looking only a bit scruffy and with only a bit of mildew down below. So now we're up to our ears in boat jobs getting her all spiffed up and ready for our next adventures. We're hoping to be finished with our below the waterline jobs by midweek - then we'll at least be back in the water to finish up. We won't bore you with our long list of jobs, a picture tells a thousand words.

Julie was on a scaffolding scrubbing and waxing Rachel the other day. A guy who was working on his boat next to us said to her “I wish my wife would work on our boat” Julie's reply “I wish she'd work on our boat too” .