Places to go, things to do

We have a friend who posts on Facebook all the events she says she's going to. Maybe she'd like to go to them, but it's physically impossible to be two places at once. The poor girl overbooks like crazy. My lovely wife and I have a saying: we can't be at all the places doing all the things. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many resources at our disposal. You have to pick and choose.

For years I've been looking to sail the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) from mile marker 1 all the way to southern Florida. I even had a nice ICW guidebook for the trip. That was lost in our shipwreck before we even got a chance to use it. Oh well, such is life.

We came very close to doing it this fall, but then I woke up one morning and decided it wasn't the year to buy a bigger boat. While it's possible to do it in an Oday 19, it would not be very comfortable for us. We decided to do one more year of shallow water sailing. The little Oday is well suited for the shallow waters of Florida's Gulf Coast, Florida Bay and the Keys. There are some pretty cool places that you can't get into with a greater than 3 foot draft. We figure the ambulance/camper van has at least one more long road in it. After that, who knows? For now it's a pretty good tow vehicle for the sailboat.

Here it is August and we are making winter plans, but it's not too early. There are places we want to go that will require reservations well in advance. Fortunately, there are also plenty of places where we can probably get into by just showing up. We have back up plans in case those places are not available. In a pinch we can always dry camp for the night as the van is pretty self contained.

One of the things I'd like to get before the trip is a decent waterproof camera. Camera phones have come a long way, but having a stand alone camera would be nice. My poor phone is already doing heavy duty as everything from a chart plotter to the heart of a music system.

Yesterday my lovely wife and I made a list of all things we have to do before we go. It's a long list. Some things are more critical than others so it's good to have it written down. Of course, if you know anything about lists, they tend to never get much shorter as new things are added. Eventually enough of the critical stuff is done and it's time to go.

My lovely wife and I are looking forward to doing some more traveling. There's a lot of things to do here in New England and Canada before the snow flies. Let's not even start on the house projects yet to do.

-Sixbears