Tahiti Beach- not much beach exposed at high tide

Surprise! We are crossing sooner than later. Not exactly music to my ears, but not sour notes either. One minute it looked like we had a week until the right conditions, and the next- bam- how about Thurs, 3 days from now? That fickle weather thing. The approaching cold front was going to stall and allow us a two-day window to travel 170nm from our marina base to Green Turtle Cay, Abaco where we’d clear in and wait out the front.

We didn’t have to take this window but it looked good and since we had a rental car for Tues & Wed for final provisioning, it was doable. If we weren’t so experienced with the prep process, this rush would have been a bad idea, but this is our 6^th crossing. 🙂

As you can see from the title, I’d planned on one long post for our time here before our esteemed guests arrived Jan 6. Then we picked up the latest Destination Abaco (free glossy tourist booklet) and the past quarter’s Abaco Life mini magazine. We always glean an interesting fact or two about Abaco history and/or local residents/happenings.

What I’ll do is share some history (taken from the above mentioned booklets) about Green Turtle Cay, Treasure Cay, Man-o-War Cay, Marsh Harbor and Hope Town in a few separate posts and include any worthy photos taken while we were there. Treasure was on our stop list but we didn’t make it there this time.

With a month to bounce around the Abacos; we hoped to spend time at all our favorite places and we did!  The weather cooperated much better than one would expect, even for December, with long stretches of settled conditions that included NO rain and NO wind over 12kts and many days of “light & variable”- my absolute favorite forecast.

Our bouncing went like this: Green Turtle to Hope Town to Man o’ War, to Marsh, to Tahiti Beach, to off Firefly, down to Little Harbor, back up to Marsh Harbor, over to Hope Town and back to Marsh for our marina reservation starting Jan 3.

Our Spectra watermaker gave us some grief early on because when you don’t make water (just flushing every few days isn’t the same) for a couple of months, and then you do- well stuff happens- or in our case- it didn’t happen! Russ resolved the problem without nearly killing himself as he did last December and Spectra has sent parts to our son who will play delivery guy.

Our (one and only) toilet has this solenoid thing that makes the fresh flushing water operate- or not. 🙂 Of course we have a spare and that has become the new operating part but not a perfect one, so the company has sent another to guess who? 😉 Now we have, if I may quote our dear one, “all the amenities!  … the five-star experience you can expect aboard Twin Sisters!” Russ & I both cracked up laughing at that. Here we thought we just had the essentials!

Hopefully that does it for boat troubles, but we still have months to go and you know how stuff comes in threes- we have two so far. Stay tuned my friends- I’ve been too long without posting!

Ah, a sparkling day on the ICW

Hello again!

I’m going to devote precious little space to what it took for us to establish ourselves as Florida residents, with a new mailing address, new local bank, new storage place, new drivers licenses, register and title the dinghy, register to vote, apply for Florida healthcare and then add, change and delete all that one must when you have a new address. Russ deserves a gold medal for his patient, tireless efforts and for putting up with my exasperated discourse every time things went awry; oh and you know they zigged when we wanted zag, changed plans on the fly and lord, I am so, so glad it’s done.

Even getting our Enterprise rental car on Nov 15 so we could get to DMV, dentist, etc, had him gone one solid hour and the place was less than a mile away from the marina!!  If you need to know more, I’ve added a page (tab) for the topic.

We arrived at FPCM a few days early which meant we could check out the well-known and extensive Farmers’ Market.

2017 is Year 21

Sunny, breezy and delightful. Live music too. Every Saturday and a much smaller one Wednesday afternoons.

Marina in the background- great location!

So colorful

The crafters’ section- about three times what you see here.

DMV or not? We opted for what may look like a DMV office but is in fact the county tax collector’s office. Everything is much larger here in Florida compared to Connecticut.

We had # 541, not a long wait from #537

This place is in Vero Beach. Been in an old neighborhood for many years.

Donuts- yes we managed to work in plenty of those. Donut Circus in Fort Pierce was the best- not super fancy but fresh and how can you beat $4.21 for 6? plus we often got a 7th included for free. 🙂  The local law enforcement could be found there too, only they tried to go incognito. Got a tip about Jupiter Donuts in Stuart but never got that far.

Oh look, am I not so very attractive??

Egrets- ah they kept me busy one morning. You get the idea.

Not giving up!

Flew on Spirit Airlines from Orlando to Windsor Locks, CT. Spirit is no frills and their version of First Class is four seats in the first row. We took two to keep Russ and his long legs comfortable for the 3-hour non-stop flight.

The Marriott Springhill Suites was pricey but only a very short walk to the Uhaul pickup location. We opted for Hotels.com, so as to get some good deals for all our hotel nights this trip.

Spent Tuesday and part of Wednesday carefully loading the Uhaul, then turned in our keys and bid farewell to our storage unit of seven years. Felt like early Christmas as I peeked into boxes and the drawers of my linen press; first glimpse of the contents since packing up in 2010.

Done and packed so nothing should move

Enjoyed a happy family Thanksgiving in Ivoryton, CT. Benj drove down and we got to spend a few extra hours with him on Friday before we needed to start the long drive back to Florida.

An apres shopping warm bevvie and dessert at Dagmar’s. Father and son I’d say

He has my lovely teeth! And the Rackliffe curly hair. He also travels to some cool places 🙂

There’s no avoiding I-95, but we wanted to avoid tolls as much as possible and the Cross Bronx Expressway leading to the GW.  Our EZPass could not be used on the Uhaul and we couldn’t know which toll plazas still had a cash lane or were electronic only.  And as you may guess, we wanted to drive over the new Tappan Zee Bridge and make sure that final span was properly in place. 🙂

Tappan Zee Bridge- the new one

No missing spans here! Glad they got it in place between Sept and now

Traveling, flying and driving can be stressful, but if you have a nice room and a king bed to fall into, how great is that? You all may be spoiled but we sleep in a cave-like space just this side of Queen. And by that I mean “down” side.

Yippee another King bed!

Two and a half days after leaving Connecticut we arrived back at the marina without incident; just a few traffic backups on Sunday. Gotta love Google Maps for driving.

Monday we got back into the heavy lifting and managed to get 95% packed into the new unit.

The hard part is done: setting up the table for the boxes on left, and carrying in and nestling the other table pieces

The St Lucie County Christmas parade took place a snowball’s throw from the marina. Talk about weird- not cold, no snow and hot beverages to warm you up. Still, was festive and I got to wear what minimal warm weather Christmas-y things I have.

Christmas parade and tree lighting afterward

What’s a Florida parade without a boat or two?

The park where the weekly market takes place has all these tall palms and not long after arriving here we watched the county workers wrap lights around the trunks. Each tree had some sort of small box as part of the light strands. Then the day came for the parade and tree lighting- Dec 2 and we watched the palm tree light show as the colors changed, often rapidly, in keeping with the music.

The palms in the park at the marina are lit with special lights that change color with the notes of the song. This year seems to be Mannheim Steamroller. Excellent choice!

May you all be blessed with the joy, love and peace of the holiday season. Wishing you superb health and happiness in the New Year!