Holiday Road Trip Prep

03 - 09 November 2017

After we got back from Atlanta and Savannah we had about a week to prepare for our long holiday road trip. I had a handbook meeting the next week in Wichita, with Thanksgiving the week after, where for the last 50 years my family has had a picnic somewhere outside of Prescott, AZ. Heather had medical appointments back in Phoenix just before and after Thanksgiving, and I had an eye appointment. We looked at the airfare and rental cars required and it made at least as much sense to drive, even with Heather's Companion Pass on Southwest. After dragging a 12 foot trailer across the country with all of Chelsea's crap in it, another cross country road trip no longer seemed as intimidating.

Since it really didn't seem worth the effort to go back to the boat a week after Thanksgiving, only to return to Arizona and New Mexico two weeks later, we decided just to stay, spending most of that time at Heather's mother's in Las Cruces. This meant we would be gone from the boat for more than seven weeks, again a new record on the longest we had been away since we had bought it. Between moving Chelsea and renting the house and now the holidays we were spending way too much time way from the boat. We will have to make up for that when we get back just after the first of the year.

On Friday at the clubhouse there was a Coast Guard presentation on communications and safety that was mostly familiar. Our diver was scheduled for the next day to clean the bottom, and based on the noise inside the boat it was pretty bad. I got the dinghy in the water for the first time since we had arrived in Brunswick for another guy to buff the hull. We had had it done soon after we bought the boat in Houston but it hadn't been done since. Much to my surprise it was about half of what they had charged in Houston and it looked great. We'll have him return when we get back to the boat to do the topsides.

We finished arranging holiday airfare for the kids and refilled the water tanks. We cleaned the car and checked the oil. We emptied the fridge and the freezer and the pantry and cleaned them out. We finally got to the fuel dock for our pump out, and after much discussion and planning and preparation had a perfect docking back into our slip, somewhat making up for the first time. As our departure got closer we started cleaning and straightening the boat, including the catch-all nav desk and the dreaded back cabin which had not been gone through since we left Marathon.

On Thursday we finished buttoning up the boat and checking the lines and left for Tallahassee to see Chelsea and Travis on our way west.

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