Thanksgiving!!

Much has happened since my last blog!!  After getting the boat looked after at Barron's Boatyard, our plan was to put her back in the water on the following Monday and begin our journey south along the Jersey Atlantic coast.  However, Monday there was a tornado warning in New York Harbour, so decided to stay on the hard one more night, and then head out the following morning to try and take advantage of a small weather window and at least get to Sandy Hook, south of New York Harbour, which marks the beginning of the Jersey coastline, a distance of about 30 miles from City Island.  George's check on the weather at 0400 hrs confirmed the weather had not changed, so at about 8:00am we were preparing the boat to be put back in the water when a fellow sailor mentioned that the weather forecast had changed for the worse.  We went back to our weather system, and sure enough, the weather was forecast to be high winds, high seas for the next five days at least!!!  We quickly decided that even if we could get as far as Coney Island or Sandy Hook, we would then be stuck there for quite a while anyway, so we might as well stay where we were.  We really like City Island.....nice walking available, lots of restaurants, and grocery stores available and even a good laundromat, not to mention the fact that the people at Barron's Boatyard are great and our boat was in a good, safe location!  So in no time, we decided to 'forget the plays!', rent a car, and head home for Thanksgiving!!!

We were able to rent a van from Enterprise in New Rochelle (trivia alert....Rob and Laura Petrie from the Dick VanDyke show lived there!!), and by Wednesday morning we were making our way north for a much-anticipated visit with our wonderful family!!!!!  We feel so fortunate that everything really worked out well!  We had good visits with all the 'eastern' family members; visiting Dad and Lisa,  Elspeth and Fraser and Murdoch (he really likes his new 'country digs!!'), Wil and Didi and their two fantastic boys, Pat and Fiona, and Chris and Anne and our beautiful, happy, newest grandson (finally!!), and even squished in a couple of good friends, visiting John and Elizabeth while their boat came out of the water, Mike, and finally had a delicious lunch at Fred and Deborah's!!!!  The crowning event was the wonderful dinner and evening that my Mom had organized at her home for the family on Sunday night, where we also saw our nephew, Alex and his girlfriend, and Chip and Kathy and three of their girls!!  All in all, a wonderful trip......hard to get ourselves back on the road and back to the boat!!!!

We did end up staying an extra day because I managed to come down with the beginnings of a cold, so took a day of rest before heading back to New York, as we knew we were likely to do an overnight sail from there to possibly Atlantic City, and hopefully as far as Cape May, right at the entrance to the Delaware Bay and we needed to be rested for that!  So exactly one week after leaving City Island, we returned on Wednesday, October 16 and began to prepare the boat and ourselves to head back out in to the North Atlantic!

We have much to be thankful for!!