20th Nomadiversary

We are anchored in the Hudson River, in General Anchorage 17 of the Port of New York (map). This is a familiar spot for us since the closure of the W. 79th Street Boat Basin at the end of 2021. While we are actually anchored in New Jersey, just a little over a mile from where I went to high school, we are here because of the boat landing across the river at Dyckman Street, in the Inwood district of Manhattan, a neighborhood with which we are now thoroughly familiar.

The million-dollar view from our anchorage.

Exactly 20 years ago today, we closed the door on our last full-time fixed dwelling, a condominium unit in downtown San Jose, California, for a final time before setting off in our custom-built motor coach home, Odyssey, for which this blog is named. Odyssey was our full-time home for just a hair shy of a full decade, when we transitioned to the life aquatic aboard Vector.

I regret it now, but we were juggling so many things during the early days of bus life that I did not have the bandwidth to post here in the blog, even though I had previously taken steps to create it. It was a full three months before I started blogging in earnest, and though I made some vague reference to trying to backfill those three months, in reality they are lost to history. You can read my very first post from the road here, and if you click "Newer Post" at the bottom you can scroll through the whole blog. You'll have to click over 2,600 times to get back to this post.

It was raining when we set the hook, and this was our reward, a rainbow stretching from The Bronx to Manhattan.

The blog has evolved over those 2,600+ posts. Early on, we had no good way to generate and post map links, which came along later and went through some iterations including Mapquest and others before coalescing on the Google Maps links we use today. And we did not have many photos in the early days; when we did, they usually went into a separate post rather than inline in the text. The march of technology has made it all much easier.

On the bus, of course, I could not type under way, and I tried to post from every stop or two, lest I get behind. On the boat, it's much easier for me to do my typing at the helm, when we are under way in open water. Typing takes longer, because I am still maintaining a lookout and I can't even make it through a paragraph without scanning the horizon and the instruments, but the hours are long and so it works out. Good typing days are sometimes infrequent, and some posts now end up covering a span of two or three weeks. Also, Past Me sometimes annoys Present Me by omitting important details like whether or not a particular restaurant was any good, and so Present Me is including a lot more detail nowadays to avoid annoying Future Me when we come back to a place years later.

The day we arrived was also the blue supermoon, rising over The Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park, and Dyckman Landing. That's our neighbor, the tug Choptank, at left.

With two decades of nomadic experiences and memories, this blog is sometimes the only way we keep it all straight. Our memory plays tricks on us, but having it here in print can restore our sanity. An expression we sometimes use is that we drink to forget, but we blog to remember. In preparing to write this post today, I found myself reading a dozen or so old posts, in the way you can't stop yourself from reading those old notes you found while going through the attic. I was looking for when we first started posting about our "nomadiversary," which turned out to be our ninth, written up here, wherein I shared where we got that term.

Having now spent nearly a third of my life, and nearly half my adult life, as a peripatetic, the logistics of doing so have become second nature. Which is not to say there are no difficulties, only that we've become accustomed to them. The benefits are legion, and I am typing right now with a million-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline as a reminder of that.

The George Washington Bridge as seen through the glass of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The terminal also contained a very nice grocery store, and a Marshalls that had a suitcase Louise has been needing. I ended up here while Louise was having an eye exam a block away.

Speaking of which, long-time readers will know that we always stop in New York City when we pass through, and we've stayed for several weeks at a stretch to enjoy what the city has to offer. This time is no different, but we adjusted the timing of our visit to coincide with our good friend from California, who is here because her mother is in the hospital for heart surgery. The hospital is literally a ten minute subway ride, after a ten minute walk, from where we land the tender, and so it has all been super convenient. We've been meeting her either at her hotel, the hospital lobby, or a pub we found in the neighborhood, the Fort Washington Public House. Ironically that pub turns out to be nearly a carbon copy of the pub we like right here in Inwood, with the same owner, the Tryon Public House.

Right across from the pub is the historic Audubon Ballroom, famous, among other things, for being the place where Malcom X was assassinated. You can make out his image in one of the windows.

While we are here in Manhattan, I am trying to arrange a yard visit in Mamaroneck to get some lingering issues with the paint addressed, and, time permitting, some other work done. The yard manager has been elusive and nothing is, as yet, pinned down. I expect we'll be in the NYC area through September, with a goal of heading south in October, a bit earlier than our start south last year.

We're enjoying our time here, but it is colored by some devastating family medical news that we received right after we arrived. Respecting the privacy of our family, that is all I will share here in the blog. We're also grappling with less serious but rather urgent medical news from some boating friends. Boats are needy, whether you are healthy enough to care for them or not, and I have offered my help in getting their boat to a better place if need be, which would leave Louise to care for Vector in the interim. If they accept my offer I will update our plans here.

Today we pass a children's back-to-school fair on Dyckman street, complete with pony rides and this petting zoo.

Crossing the Hudson this afternoon from our dinghy landing in Manhattan, we had to divert for a swimmer who was circling Manhattan. (They had a safety boat with them.) We knew this was coming, because the Coast Guard had announced it in the morning, and it's in the Local Notices to Mariners. The swimmers left The Battery at 11:12 this morning and were expected to take until 7:12 this evening to return to The Battery.

This is not the first time we've been in the river for the swim around Manhattan, officially known as the 20 Bridges Swim, part of the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming (the other two are the English Channel and the Catalina Channel). I marvel at it every time, because when I was growing up here, you could hardly swim in the Hudson, and swimming in the East River or the Harlem River was unthinkable. Certainly the sort of exertion, breathing of water vapor, and mouthfuls of water involved in a strenuous eight-hour swim was out of the question. And if you had asked me back then if I could ever imagine people swimming in these rivers, I would have told you no, without qualification.

Vector looking diminutive against the NJ Palisades. As seen from my walk along the waterfront north of the bridge.

It is a testament to the environmental movement, and the legislation, including the creation of the EPA and the Clean Water Act, that these rivers have made such a remarkable recovery. They are by no means pristine, and there is more work to do, but I am happy to be here to enjoy them. We have a mostly clear view of the city and are breathing mostly clean air; I hope no one turns back the clock.