Still trying to get out of Dodge

My lovely wife and I had expected to be ready for the road Wednesday afternoon. Welp, so much for that. The guy who’s changing my windshield had a job go bad. I called him about forty-five minutes before his shop closed and he hadn’t touched it. However, he said he’d work late to get it done. We are picking it up at seven in the morning.

I think I’d better tip the guy. He took the job even though he’s booked solid into next week. The guy’s doing me a solid so I can head to Florida.

The cold has made my cough worse. That really saps the energy out of me and the pain wears me down. Once my lungs get a steady diet of warm moist air they should soon heal up. Hopefully I haven’t done too much damage to them.

I love the North Country, but winter and I no longer get along. It’s a darn shame as I used to really enjoy winter, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, ice fishing and other activities.

Fortunately, I’m lucky that most years I can get away from the worse of winter. All I have to do is to keep it together for a few days of travel.

The blog might go dark for a few days as I travel south.

-Sixbears

Paperwork day

It was a boring day of dealing with paperwork. My local post office held a month’s worth of mail for me. Most of my business was done over the Internet or the phone. However, I knew there was some stuff that would have to be attended to. For example, my new driver’s license was in the mail. I’ve learned from hard experience that the State of New Hampshire will not ship a new driver’s license out of state. Glad that’s been sorted out.

For the next five months my mail will be forwarded to one of my daughter’s. It’s going to be interesting when I collect that pile. Most of it will be duplicates of information of things like bank statements. I access them on-line while on the road. When it comes to financial information I’m more of a belt and suspenders sort of guy. It’s taken me a long time to adjust and I don’t full trust having just electronic records.

It was a good day to deal with that stuff as it snowed all day long. Today the Blazer goes into the shop for a new windshield. My lovely wife and I will make one more pass through the house to see if there’s anything we forgot. If all goes well we should hit the road on Thursday.

Brownie the Sailor Dog is staying will my oldest daughter in Massachusetts. She was pretty upset with us when we headed north without her. We are staying with one of our other daughters and her husband is allergic to dogs. We plan on picking up the dog on the way through. I suspect she’s not going to let us out of her sight for a while.

My lovely wife and I are really looking forward to leaving the snow behind.

-Sixbears

Best laid plans

It’s a good thing that there’s a fair amount of slack in our travel schedule. The trip has already been set back a day. Our departure date has slipped from Wednesday to Thursday.

Originally the Blazer was going to get a state inspection done at my mechanic’s on Monday. There was nothing wrong with it when it had been parked. However, while parked, a tiny crack in the windshield spread completely across from one end to the other. The crack was definitely big enough to cause the Blazer to flunk the inspection. The earliest I could get that fixed is sometime Wednesday afternoon.

I kept the appointment at the garage anyway. With the exception of the windshield the Blazer would have passed. Once the windshield is replaced it they’ll slap a sticker on. Since the vehicle had barely started, it seemed like a good idea to load test the battery. It was weak so that got replaced. No sense being stuck on the highway somewhere.

The Blazer was pretty much fully loaded, so I had the mechanic adjust the headlights. With a full load and trailer on, they would have been pointing too high. That’s something a lot of people don’t think about.

Monday my lovely wife and I connected with a couple of friends. We won’t see them again for months so it’s good to have caught up. While the Internet helps us stay connected, it’s just not the same.

We are fortunate our daughter and her family have been putting us up while we sort out our preparations for the trip south. Next year they are moving to Vermont so we’ll have to do it without their support.

-Sixbears

Snow, Ice and a Boat

My son-in-law gave me a hand digging out the sailboat and Blazer. Both of them were encased in about eight inches of a frozen ice/snow mix. The town plow had also left pretty good snowbanks behind. When my lovely wife and I shut the house down at the end of October we hoped the snow would have waited. It didn’t.

Thank goodness my son-in-law has a powerful snowblower. However, even the blower wasn’t fully up to the task. A lot of the ice and snow had to broken up with shovels and pitchfork. It was one degree Fahrenheit. The Blazer wasn’t too interested in starting. I tried to open the hood, but everything was frozen solid. On a whim I tried the starter one more time and the engine cranked over. The Blazer was able to pull the boat out due to new tires and four wheel drive. Now it’s sitting in my daughter’s driveway.

After lunch I went back up to the lake. It took a few more hours to pack up the rest of the gear we need for our southern trip.

Today will be spent running around taking care of business. My mechanic will be checking out the Blazer before my lovely wife and I tow the boat south.

Right now there’s a huge snowstorm hitting New England. We are fortunate in that the storm didn’t quite make it to the northern tip of New Hampshire. We could get some light snow later in the day. With that in mind, I’m going to cover up the boat with a large tarp.

Wednesday could be our departure day, but that hinges on everything going well. I’m not going to tow a boat throw a blizzard.

-Sixbears

Points north and south

Black Friday the family went into Boston, not to shop, but to visit the Museum of Science. Our crew consisted of my lovely wife, our two daughters, their husbands, four grandkids and myself. It sure beat shopping for stuff.

However, my lovely wife and I were getting burned out on city crowds. People in Boston were actually generally fairly nice, but there are so many of them. In our hearts, we are country people.

Today we are driving back to northern New Hampshire. Our middle daughter is putting us up for a few days. She only lives about ten miles from our house. We have some last minute packing to do before heading south. There’s also last minute business that needs to be attended to.

Sunday a snowstorm is supposed to move it. Right now it doesn’t look like we’ll have decent travel weather until Wednesday. Our schedule has a fair amount of slack built into it. It’s the first time towing our boat with the Blazer. I always take it easy when towing. Those little trailer wheels have to make a lot of rotations. Stopping to let them cool and keeping they well greased is a big help.

My lovely wife has me checking the weather along the way. We have some time booked in a campground near St. Augustine Florida. Sometimes it’s actually fairly cold there, but the long range forecast looks decent. If it didn’t we’d keep heading south, even if we have to go all the way to the Keys.

I really enjoyed Thanksgiving. My lovely wife and I were blessed to be able to experience it with family.

-Sixbears

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday. What can be better than getting together with people, having a good meal, and being thankful for the blessings in our lives?

Unlike Christmas it appears that Thanksgiving has limited commercial possibilities. Outside of turkeys and a few decorations, there’s not a lot of stuff to sell us. One of the reasons I like it so much.

Hope everyone has a good day, no matter how they celebrate.

-Sixbears

Malled

My lovely wife and I refuse to go shopping on Black Friday. We certainly don’t shop on Thanksgiving. That’s when people should have the day off to spend with their family.

With that in mind, we thought we’d get some early Christmas shopping done on Tuesday. We’ll be far from home on Christmas so we want to get a few things for the grandkids ahead of time.

There are a couple of massive thriving malls near my daughter’s house. My lovely wife and I split up. I spent hours going from one end of the mall to the other. Nothing in the place interested me in the least. Hours later I caught up to my lovely wife. She was still in the first large store she stopped in. The poor girl was bouncing around the store like a ball bearing in a packing crate. She hadn’t found anything of interest either.

At one time malls provided at least a few things of interest to us. Now it all seems like so much nothing.

On the bright side, we did find some gifts in a large bookstore earlier in the day. Large bookstores aren’t all about books anymore. They had a good selection of quality toys and games. Of course, being a bookstore, I found a few things of interest. At the very least they can be counted on to have some boating magazines.

-Sixbears