29 April 15

Well, our bags are packed and we are ready to go. The long winter break has finally come to an end. We have closed up the house and loaded the new dinghy “Swallow” into a rented Penske truck, along with a few other boat trinkets and now it is time to drive the 1800 miles to Jamestown, RI to rejoin “c’est le bon” and continue with our adventures afloat. We got the old inflatable dinghy and the outboard engine sold over the winter, so we are committed to our new means of shore transport (i.e., “Swallow”) and will try to go green by using only arm and back muscles to push the dinghy around.  

Followers of our blog will have noticed that this year, we have started up later than ever: 2 Feb 2013, 18 Mar 2014, to 6 May 2015. We we froze our butts off the first 6 weeks of each of the last 2 years, and since the boat is the farthest north it has ever wintered, we were determined not to make that same mistake again. This year, we are planning to “do” the Down East Circle (i.e., up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal, into Lake Ontario, down the St. Lawrence via Montreal and Quebec City, into St. Lawrence Bay, past the Gaspe Peninsula, past Prince Edward Island, and around the outside of Nova Scotia and thence across the Bay of Fundy back to Maine. Theoretically, we can make the whole circuit in one season, but it depends on how much time we linger at any one spot along the way. So, we will see; it is about even odds that we will end up parking the boat for the winter of ’15/’16 somewhere north of the border. But more on all that later.

We got up relatively early for us - 06:30 - and finally got on the road about 09:00 for our long, but otherwise uneventful, drive to Little Rock, AR. We have 8 days of travel time included in the one-way rental of the truck to get from Houston to Jamestown, and we will probably use all of that. We got into Little Rock about 16:30, then ran to Best Buy to get some more accessories for the new GoPro camera and find a spot for dinner.