Fast track

We are at the Bahia Mar Resort Hotel and Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (map), between the ocean beach and the Intracoastal Waterway, and the venue for Trawler Fest. As they did last year, the parking folks here at the hotel are charging us $50 per night, and since we came in on Wednesday and will remain here through Sunday morning I dropped $200 in cash at the gate.

As I wrote back then, that's still favorable compared to the $170 per night for a room here or the $120 per night to dock a 40' boat, and the convenience of being to come and go at will throughout the show and to stumble back here after the nightly cocktail parties makes it worthwhile. Still, it is the most we have ever paid for a spot in an asphalt lot with no hookups.

Wednesday afternoon we reconnected with Martin and Steph and met for cocktails aboard Eagle VI with new friends Richard and Kathy, followed by dinner at Coconuts just up the block. Yesterday was the first day of the show and we had an extremely busy day on the docks, which I will report on later due to time constraints. Fellow bus-nomads Ben and Karen also came by in the afternoon to check out the show and we spent a little time with them; they are parked out at Markham county park. We also got a chance to meet blog reader Laura, who happens to be a salesperson for Kadey-Krogen.

The big news at the moment, however, happens to be that we got a call from our leads at the Red Cross on Wednesday asking if we could both fly to DC for five days in early February to help with a new training program that is being rolled out. It is an important program and since we have been heavily involved in the training development for technology for the past couple years, we felt we needed to try to accommodate this request.

Since we are still hoping to make our commitment in Death Valley in early March, what a five-day excursion to DC will do to our schedule is to more or less double our daily driving time from an average of 2.5 hours to 5 hours. That will let us get to Killeen, Texas, where our new wiper motor should be arriving, in time to fly to DC for the training. Our friends there, Don and CC, are also involved in the training development, and CC will also be flying to DC. Don has generously agreed to watch over our pets while we are gone, and they have a place we can park Odyssey.

So Sunday morning after we say our final goodbyes, we will high-tail it out of Fort Lauderdale. I expect that, uncharacteristically, we will most stay on the freeway all the way to Texas, and we should be out of Florida by the first of February. I expect this will be my last blog post from Trawler Fest, since we are somewhat overbooked here, and I will try to catch everyone up from our next couple of stops.