Unalienable Rights

Happy Independence Day, everyone. We are back under way, northbound in the Hudson River, with no particular stop in mind for the day. We had a late start waiting for the end of the ebb, and we'll ride the flood until the confluence of a good anchorage and a pre-dinner stopping time.

Early fireworks on the Poughkeepsie waterfront from our anchorage. People were setting them off well past our bedtime.

Wednesday evening we did go ashore, landing at the park dock on the Poughkeepsie waterfront. Signs limit docking to 15 minutes in consideration of other boaters, but with the river and dock empty mid-week, we were not too worried about it. We hiked up the hill in search of dinner, scoping out the train station on our way.

Of the three or four restaurants in walking distance, none was appealing, and we ended up at the taco joint right next to the dock, which has a full bar. We were able to get a somewhat shady table on the patio, where we could also keep an eye on the dock in case we needed to move the dink. The food was fine, so we made the right choice.

Vector anchored in the Hudson, as seen from the Poughkeepsie waterfront.

In the morning we weighed anchor just at the end of the ebb and headed three quarters of a mile back downriver to Shadows Marina, adjacent to the fine-dining restaurant of the same name. We tied up on the outside face dock (map), where we were met by dockmaster Keith, who was oddly indifferent about collecting the slip fees.

We spent the next couple of hours going through shutdown and layup checklists and getting ready for our trip, then made the three-quarter mile hike to the train station. We were unprepared for the Ethan Allen Express to be absolutely packed on a Thursday, and we found no empty seats together or anywhere even close to one another; the conductor told me that all the trains were sold out for the holiday weekend. We ended up sitting in the snack car until Hudson, sipping a beer I purchased to justify taking up a table.

Mid-Hudson Bridge as seen from our anchorage. The lights along the main cable cycled through many colors.

In spite of that it was a lovely train ride. Running alongside the river drives home how slowly we move in the boat. Before we left the boat, a couple of loopers passed us going upriver on full plane, doing maybe 15-20 knots, which to us is lightning fast. On the train we flew past those same boats a good two hours later, leaving them in the dust at 70mph. At Hudson the train started to empty out and we moved to a pair of more comfortable seats in one of the coaches.

My cousin Chris picked us up at the station at Fort Edward and drove us over to the VRBO in Lake George, a seven-bedroom affair that turned out to be an early-20th century manor home, complete with servants' stairs and call system leading directly to the kitchen from the back hallway above. We had a lovely room overlooking the lake, and I think only four bedrooms ever saw use during our stay.

Servant call annunciator in the kitchen. The little arrows told you which station pressed the call button when the bell rang. This house likely had a cook and a housekeeper. 

The next three days were a whirlwind of social visits with my cousins and their extended family interspersed with setting up and then tearing down our nephew's graduation party. The party was Saturday afternoon with some 40-odd guests. As I predicted we exercised little self-control and ate far too much of the seemingly endless supply of food. After the party there was so much left over that we carried leftovers back with us which will feed us for days.

It was a great party, a wonderful weekend, and, of course, we very much enjoyed catching up with my aunt, uncle, and cousins whom we see only very occasionally. We all had to clear out of the VRBO by 10am yesterday, and since our train did not leave till 1:30, we spent a nice final hour or so with my aunt and cousin in a coffee shop in downtown Glens Falls before hitting the station. We had our pick of seats for the return trip.

Vector docked at Shadows Marina.

Amtrak was fifteen minutes late getting back in to Poughkeepsie, and we were back at the dock, hauling a couple dozen extra pounds of loot, just before 5pm. Keith came over to collect the fees as we were making ready for departure. With two very large boats inbound for the holiday festivities, he was very appreciative that we kept our word about our departure, and charged us a good deal less than I had expected to pay for our three-night stay.

We were under way at 5:10pm, and with almost two hours of flood left, we ran eight miles upriver to a nice anchorage east of Esopus Island (map), between a yacht club and a state park. It uncharacteristically took us three tries to get the hook set in a spot with good holding where we would not swing into the shallows. Dinner on the aft deck was, of course, leftovers, and we hardly made a dent.

Dinner on deck -- pulled pork sandwiches with fruit salad and chips.

This morning we waited until the change of tide to weigh anchor, which meant we did not get under way until after noon. The plotter says we'll be in Catskill around 4:30, but we'll have plenty of flood left and will probably push on at least to Athens. We've already missed the fireworks in Catskill, which were on Saturday, and Kingston, which has them today, is now behind us. On this, our fourth time through here, we're opting for making distance rather than smelling the roses.

The tug Elk River pushing a fuel barge upriver passes the downbound Erieborg from our anchorage. We were right next to the pilot station and you can see the pilot boat alongside; we watched one pilot board and the other disembark. I follow the former skipper of the Elk River online.

In large part that is to keep our options open. July is a late start up the Hudson for it, but one of those options is to take the Down East Circle route, which would bring us down the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the Canadian Maritimes, then back along the coast into Maine and closing the loop in New York. Lots of ducks have to line up for that, including a timely start into the Seaway, water levels in the lake, and weather forecasts for the maritimes.

We won't make an actual decision until we are well into the Thousand Islands. But it can't happen at all if we don't make steady progress towards them. The point of no return is roughly Brockville, NY, beyond which there is really too much current for us to turn around. If we wave off, we'll be coming right back this way, on a much more leisurely pace.

Approaching the Esopus Meadows lighthouse.

We did have a brief moment of excitement this morning. A sailboat made an abrupt tack right in front of us, and as I was trying to figure out which way they were going to go, I realized they were trying to circle back to their dog, who was in the water. In short order the skipper jumped in after the dog, leaving the mate to try to wrangle the boat. We stopped dead, but as we were noodling on how best to help, a State Trooper boat just happened along right at that instant. All's well that ends well, and we resumed our journey.

A very wet dog and skipper on the back of the Trooper boat, as the mate tries to steer away from the cliff.

Wednesday I expect we will lower our mast, and by Thursday we should be off the Hudson River and into the Erie Canal. My ability to type underway will be more limited, so we will be well into the canal when you next hear from me.

Thirteenth Nomadiversary Eclipse

Well once again the time got away from me, and it's now been over a month since my last post. There has been a lot of water over the dam in that time and I will do my best to catch up completely.


The megayacht Fountainhead. The glow on her bow is from underwater uplights on her bulbous bow.

Before I get into the more mundane parts of the update, it's worth spending a moment on Hurricane Harvey, which at this writing is still wreaking havoc in Texas. Many of our colleagues in the Red Cross are either already there or are waiting for transportation to become available; both Houston airports are still closed. We also have friends and family in Houston, all of whom are hunkered down and completely surrounded by flood waters.

As long-time disaster relief workers, it is incredibly hard for us to sit here in comfort and watch this unfold without being able to go help. A disaster of this scale strains the resources of all relief organizations, and as the Red Cross possibly begins to run out of trained personnel we are keeping open the possibility of extending our stay here so one of us can fly to Texas to help. The demands of the boat (and the cat) dictate that one of us will need to remain here with the boat.


One of the numerous spectacular sunsets from the dock.

Ground zero for landfall was Port Aransas and Rockport, and you may recall we were there just three short months ago. The rapidity with which this system developed and moved ashore left no time at all for a boat such as Vector to escape, and this is precisely why we made haste to leave the gulf as hurricane season got under way. The very marinas where we stayed in Rockport and Port Aransas suffered major damage, with some less extensive damage where we stayed in Corpus Christi. Galveston and Clear Lake, also on our recent itinerary, also saw damage to vessels.

Our hearts and thoughts are with the people of Texas and the relief workers and first responders who are there to help them. If you would like to help, please send money, and nothing else. I have written about this here before, more than once, most recently in this post. Please read it, and follow the links, to learn why sending anything at all, no matter how much sense it seems to make, actually hampers real relief.


Projects mean parts, and parts means boxes, and Angel loves boxes.

Speaking of tropical storms, you will recall we suffered some damage to our flybridge top in Biloxi during Tropical Storm Cindy. In my last post I shared some of the work I had already done to remove hardware from the top so that the canvas could be removed. In fact, a large part of my time across the next three weeks also went into the project, which proved even larger than anticipated. The work was extensive enough to warrant it's own post, which will be forthcoming shortly; I'm happy to report that it's complete and the repaired canvas is re-installed.

Toward the end of our cruise here from Fort Lauderdale, we rolled past the 4,000-hour mark on our engine. The engine had just 1,166 hours on it when we bought the boat, and I did the 2,000-hour service myself, adjusting valve lash, tightening fasteners, and adjusting the belts. Given some of the issues we've had recently and that it's our only means of propulsion, I decided to enlist professional help for the 4,000-hour service.


This really never gets old.

Those issues included a slow trickle of diesel fuel into the bilge, excessive soot on the transom, and a very slow consumption of engine coolant. We isolated the fuel issue to a leaky fuel return line during our passage here, and our technical guru at Lugger felt the coolant consumption was most likely a pinhole leak in the aftercooler. He suggested looking at the fuel injectors as a result of the extra soot. We called the local Lugger service dealer in town, who also happens to be the local injector service shop, and scheduled a tech to come out.

This was a two-visit proposition, since the injectors would have to be tested and serviced offsite. Long-time diesel mechanic James came out, bringing with him some specialized tools for extracting the injectors; most notably a sort of slide-hammer with threads for the injector at one end. He very quickly pronounced the engine in excellent health and got to work removing the injectors, which looked pretty good.


Injectors out for service. Not bad at 4k hours.

The shop cleaned and tested all six injectors, which all turned out to be within spec and not in need of rebuild or replacement. A couple of days later, James came back out to re-install them, bringing with him a borescope to inspect  the cylinders. The borescope inspection revealed the cylinders in good condition, with crosshatch still prominent on the liners, and normal valve deposits. While the injectors were still out, making it easy to turn the crank by hand, we did the valve adjustment.


Inspecting the cylinders with the borescope.

James had all the injectors back in place in short order and reassembled the fuel system, to include new copper crush washers on all the return line banjo fittings. The engine fired right up and ran perfectly, but our fuel leak was still with us and, in fact, had increased in rate. It had moved, though, from the number four to the number six cylinder. Closer inspection revealed that the leak was not at one of the return banjos as we had surmised, but was instead coming from the return pipe off the injector body itself. Other than that, all was good, and James wrapped up his visit.

The leaking injector is not really something that can be repaired, short of ordering an empty injector body and moving all the guts of the old one to it. I ordered a brand new injector from the local Komatsu dealer, and the leaking one has been relegated to spare status. It works, and could be pressed into service in an emergency. I was able to install the new replacement myself and the engine service is now complete. We opted to just live with the minuscule coolant consumption until it becomes worse, rather than try to pull the aftercooler for testing.


One of my many side projects. The keyboard on the backup chart computer quit. I replaced the black original with this white aftermarket for nine bucks.

Vector was not the only one with scheduled maintenance here in Charleston. As long as we had a couple of months in place, we've been catching up on doctors' appointments. We've both already been to the dentist, for example, and I've had my regular PSA check. Louise had a couple of eye doctor visits, necessitated by sudden appearance of extra "floaters" and peripheral flashes, sometimes the early sign of retina issues. She's been given a clean bill of health, though, and now I'm the only one due for a checkup. We also found a good local massage therapist and we've each had two or three sessions.

Speaking of eyes, the reason we chose Charleston as our hurricane-season escape and not someplace further north (and thus even lower storm probability) was for the opportunity to see the total eclipse last week. To that end, Louise had ordered some fancy solar viewing glasses with nice plastic frames on Amazon, nominally ISO-certified, which we've had in our possession for over a month. Then, just a week ahead of the eclipse, we got a note from Amazon saying they could not verify that the glasses were really ISO compliant or safe, telling us not to use them, and providing a full refund.


Moon and sun in alignment means astronomically high tides...

This was just a day before we left town for a week. I spent the better part of a morning calling everyplace I could think of to get replacements on short order. Every place in town was sold out, and I think you could have scalped eclipse glasses for a tidy profit. The marina had a whole case of them, but they, too, learned their supply was tainted and they discarded them. It turns out that the Charleston Visitors Bureau had ordered 100,000 glasses for the expected rush (over a million came), and I was able to grab a few pair from the downtown visitor center at a dollar apiece just before we left town.


The sign was not to be taken lightly. Those are parking bumpers.

Remaining here for the eclipse meant we could not get Vector all the way to New York in time to visit our west coast friends who make their annual pilgrimage there this time of year. But with the boat securely ensconced in a full-service marina, and New York a relatively short hop away, we decided to revisit one of our old traditions, rail travel. I made round-trip reservations on Amtrak well before we even arrived here.

We deposited Angel at a nice kennel in Mount Pleasant, secured Vector, had a nice final dinner here in town, and then took Lyft out to the depot in North Charleston to board the Silver Meteor to Penn Station. The train was an hour late and our roomette was already made into bunks when we boarded, so we missed out on a bit of "the experience." Amtrak is seldom on time. At least the east coast trains have a roomier upper bunk than their western counterparts, with a window even.

Another pair of trains on the LIRR got us much of the way out to Southold on the North Fork. We had a nice visit with our nieces and their extended family, ending up in Rockville Center and then onto another train to Manhattan, where Louise reconnected with a college friend whom she has not seen since graduation.


Sunset over Long Island Sound from Southold.

Two more trains brought us to New City, New York, where I have family, and we had a nice couple of days with them before reversing our steps to Penn Station and our return Amtrak. The train ride to New City was along familiar yet changed territory, as it is the train I rode daily to college in Hoboken for the better part of four years.

We had a nice dinner on the train, our ninth and final train of the trip, and all too soon the steward was knocking on our door at 04:30 for our disembarkation in Charleston. The sleepy little station where we had boarded with just a handful of people a week earlier was overwhelmed by the over 100 people who disembarked with us, a wave of eclipse tourists arriving by every possible means. I called for a Lyft when the train was still a few miles from the station, to get a jump on the crowd.


300' Fountainhead behind Vector. It made even the 150' yachts look tiny.

I've been more than a full day late on Amtrak more than once, and so we arrived more than a full day early, Sunday morning. We returned to the marina to find Eddie Lampert's 300' megayacht, Fountainhead, taking up a fifth of the Megadock behind us. By Sunday at dinner time the entire town was jam-packed with tourists, and every restaurant was sold out. We made dinner reservations first thing in the morning.


Very stylish. On the boat deck during one of the clear moments.

We did not have the best weather on eclipse day, with widespread cloud cover. A gap would open up periodically, and we would look up to see the eclipse progressing whenever it did. It was touch and go as totality approached, but we still managed to get a good view with a mostly clear opening at the very beginning. We got to see the corona through a very light cover, and the clouds moved back in just as totality ended. I don't have a camera which can capture any of this, but I did the best I could with my phone.


A view of the partial eclipse through my $1 solar filter.

During totality we were able to use our binoculars. which we had the foresight to bring up to the boat deck with us. Even with the very slight cover it was spectacular. I did not think to capture a shot of our surroundings, which were more like twilight than nighttime. Someone later aptly described the view as "sunset in all directions." The street lights and navigational lights did come on; it was all quite surreal.


We had a better view than this, but I was able to snap this shot just as the clouds closed back in.

The euphoria of the eclipse was short-lived, as each of us got word of medical issues in our respective families early in the week. Louise will likely be flying to California in the next month, and we'll probably extend our stay here in Charleston rather than continuing much further north. We had hoped to make DC this season but that's looking unlikely now.


If you look closely almost every boat is packed. Fountainhead dwarfs the 65-footers in the foreground.


The other direction. The marina was mostly full for the event, and many boats were just hanging out in the harbor.

Both the boat and the cat were mostly no worse for wear when we got back from our trip, and the kennel even gave Angel a "report card" for her stay. The one exception is that our air conditioners were inoperative when we returned. They'd come on, but shut down shortly afterward on lack of cooling water. The water here is full of muck, and we'd already cleaned the strainer twice and also backflushed a bunch out of the units themselves.


Angel's report card from camp.

We were able to get by with our two air-to-air units, Meriwether and Mr. Roboto, until a diver could come out to clean out our sea chest, which we correctly suspected had accumulated significant growth with the AC pump running full-time. We needed the bottom cleaned anyway, and will need it once more before we wrap up here. That fixed the issue and we are once again cool. We left Meriwether running the whole time we were gone, and it did a great job of keeping the whole boat dry and reasonably cool.

Thursday was our thirteenth "nomadiversary," wherein we celebrate closing the door on our last non-moving home, and moving full-time to a nomadic life. We had thought to have a celebratory dinner at our club downtown, but neither one of us was in the mood after the horrible fatal shooting and hostage situation at Virginia's on King street. I had just dropped Louise off at the eye doctor for her followup when we got the news, and I spent a half hour getting a safe-and-well message posted everywhere I could.


No cats were harmed in the making of this blog post.

By dinner time I was coming down with a horrible cold anyway, one that I am just now getting over. Louise is about a day behind me; we think we picked it up on the New York trip. I was out of commission Friday and Saturday, too miserable to even work on the blog. Yesterday I spent installing the replacement injector before getting today's photos prepped and uploaded.

Today we find ourselves trapped on the boat by yet another tropical storm. We are in the outer bands of Tropical Depression Ten, which by tonight will become Tropical Storm Irma, somewhere just offshore of right where we're sitting. It will graze along the Carolinas and probably flood the Outer Banks before heading off to sea. I was able to get a few groceries before the rain hit first thing this morning, and it's been raining ever since.

Sunset on the day of the eclipse.

Tomorrow is more of the same, and I hope to crank out another update here, detailing the flybridge project. With any luck the storm will have passed by the time we need to head out for an afternoon appointment. We'll be right here in Charleston for the foreseeable future, and I will post an update here once we have more firm plans moving forward.

Empire built

We are back home, currently still parked at Infinity Coach, after our whirlwind trip to New York. We were so busy while we were there that I never got a chance to blog, although I managed to tweet exactly once, from our layover in Chicago on our way home. We've also been going full-tilt since we returned Thursday, and this morning it was blissful to sleep in. Now that I am caught up, I finally have the time for a post.

We had a great trip. Sound Transit got us to the airport in plenty of time for a late lunch before boarding our flight. My handheld amateur radio earned me extra scrutiny at the TSA, but all made it through eventually, including both the radio and my cheap corkscrew that I keep for just such occasions. We had a celebratory beer at lunch in honor of our ninth anniversary, and in anticipation of no further imbibing to be done once we boarded. My usual seat-booking trick netted us an empty seat between us, making the five-hour flight a tad more tolerable, and we arrived on time into Newark and were in quarters at the Hampton Inn there by midnight.

I have gobs of Hilton points, even though I haven't paid for a room there in over a decade, because two out of my three credit cards rack them up. A "free" room in Newark was available at Hampton, Hilton, and Doubletree, but Hampton includes breakfast and WiFi. We dragged our sorry behinds out of bed just in time to catch the last of the hot breakfast, and shortly afterwards my folks arrived from mid-state to pick us up. We had a nice drive north, and four hours in the car together to catch up since our last visit, during the Hurricane Irene NJ relief operation for the Red Cross.

After getting settled in at the hotel in Queensbury, where we met up with my aunt and uncle, we all headed over to a nice restaurant in downtown Glens Falls to meet up with my cousin, his wife, and their son, whose First Communion we were here to celebrate. The cover story was a pre-communion family dinner, but in actuality it was a surprise 80th-birthday party for my mother, whose actual birthday was just a few days away. She really was surprised, too, and one of our clandestine roles had been to ensure they picked us up in Newark in plenty of time to make dinner.

Our "nephew" (really first cousin once removed) had his First Communion at mass Sunday morning, along with four other First Communicants. It was a nice service, followed by brunch at a nearby restaurant with family and friends from both sides. It is a rite of passage for young Catholics, and I passed on to him the talismans that I myself received on the same occasion over four decades ago. A steak dinner at their house rounded out the day.

We had a great visit and enjoyed catching up with my family over the course of the weekend. Monday morning my aunt, uncle, and folks left for points south, and my cousins later dropped us off at the train station in Albany in enough time for all of us to have one final dinner at Rudy's, just across the tracks, which we can highly recommend.

Most of the trip from Albany to Chicago is overnight, but we did enjoy a bit of scenery at both ends. After checking in at the Metropolitan Lounge at Union Station, where we were able to securely store our bags, we had plenty of time to walk over to the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) for lunch. We have an affiliate club there on the 67th floor, with stunning views in all directions. We reminisced briefly about our dinner there, just about a month before we started blogging our odyssey here -- we actually drove Odyssey into The Loop and parked on the street overnight right outside the Sears Tower, possible only because we were there on the weekend.

Union Station in Chicago is a bit of history in itself, and Amtrak's first-class Metropolitan Lounge makes waiting there between trains pleasant. In addition to the baggage check, the lounge provides free WiFi, soft drinks, coffee, and muffins, as well as early access to the boarding platform ahead of coach class. As we passed the coach-class platform entrance, we noted for the first time a phalanx of TSA employees and scanners, and it appeared that the coach passengers were being inspected before boarding. Apparently, terrorists do not travel by first class sleeper accommodations, which would lend new meaning to the term "sleeper cell."

The Empire Builder between Chicago and Seattle is the real reason we wanted to return by train, one of the few great US train trips which we had never done. We were not disappointed; despite bringing three magazines and my laptop, we never stopped looking out the windows during the daylight hours, and our attendant put the beds down shortly after we returned from the dining car each night. We traveled a portion of this route in Odyssey two years ago (waving to the passing Empire Builder in several spots), and we enjoyed seeing some of the same landmarks from a different perspective.

We noted several places we had stopped overnight as we passed through small towns and station stops. As we passed through Glacier National Park, and later the Cascade Range, I was actually able to stare at all the passing scenery, something I generally can not do as I am focused on the road when we are driving. The meals in the dining car were acceptable if not gourmet fare, and we met several interesting folks at meal times. In all, a very worthwhile excursion.

The King Street station in Seattle is partly under construction, and we had a bit of a challenge finding our way to the bus stop for the ride to Sumner. There is actually a train that would bring us here, but it only runs southbound in the late afternoon, and we were in Seattle by 10am. We will, instead, take that train north back into Seattle Monday morning to meet up with our broker to view some boats; he arrives in town Sunday evening.

When we left Infinity last Friday, I left them with a to-do list that would have kept them busy the whole time we were gone, and then some. However their backlog of other work plus the loss of an employee in the interim meant they did not even get started until the afternoon we returned. You may recall that I had removed the toilet just before we left, in order to facilitate repairing the floor in the bathroom, and, not wanting to do that nasty job twice, we lit a fire under them to expedite the floor project that same afternoon.

Louise ran off to the flooring store to pick up some new vinyl; a 3'-wide strip of roll goods cost us all of $20. Meanwhile, the rotted subfloor was removed, a consequence of the same window leak, now repaired, that cost us the replacement of half the wall in that same room back in Las Vegas. Without hookups and easy access to a clean restroom there, we did not want to remove the toilet at that shop, thus could not replace the floor at the same time as the wall.

Infinity had new subflooring in and some leveling compound applied in just enough time to be able to glue down the new flooring at the very end of the shift. Louise and I were able to wrestle the toilet back into place and I had it all reconnected in enough time to avoid any clandestine excursions to the nearby bushes after hours. And after five full days of eating out two or three meals per day, we had a light snack for dinner before crashing completely.

Yesterday was another full day at the shop, starting with pulling into the lube bay at 8:30 for a lube, oil, and filter change. Disappointingly, while the bus was up on the lifts we discovered that oil is leaking from the air dryer, confirming my suspicions. The dryer itself has no oil supply, so this can only mean that oil is leaking at the air compressor. We've never had this problem before, yet as a precaution we replaced the compressor with a remanufactured unit when we had the engine out, at Choo-Choo Garage back in July. I have to guess now that the replacement unit has a problem; too bad, because getting it out now that the engine is in the bus is a major project.

The rest of the day was taken up by finishing up the work in the bathroom, to include caulking the new floor and replacing the trim, and recaulking the shower, as well as replacing the upper front windshield trim that had been damaged by the leaks there, repaired last month in Alameda. We also pulled off the butch 'roo bars on the front of the coach, now chipped and rusted where the powder coat has been damaged by eight years of road wear, and sent it off to be media-blasted and re-coated with more durable bed-liner material. Unfortunately, the employee who left the shop was the woodworking specialist, so the various cabinetry touch-ups we had requested are probably not in the cards.

You may detect a theme in all this, which is that we are now dealing with mostly cosmetic issues. For example, we are finally sending the cat-damaged love seat out for re-upholstery here, in addition to all the other work. We are working on getting Odyssey listed for sale, in anticipation of a move onto a boat, and these sorts of cosmetic problems can be show-stoppers when trying to close a deal. Long-time readers know that, when it comes to the seldom-seen underlying systems, we've always been on top of maintenance and repairs, whereas cosmetic-only issues have been a lower priority for us. Not so with many sellers, likely because surface appearance is so visceral with most buyers.

Tomorrow's project for us is to empty the area under the loveseat and get it unbolted so the upholsterer can take it Monday morning, and get the rest of the coach ready for a day of work in our absence. We need to get on the last Sounder at 8:15am, before the shop opens, to meet our broker in Seattle Monday morning, and we'll be back long after the shop closes. On their slate for Monday is to adjust both awnings, pull out the loveseat, and try to get Truck-Lite and their retailer to honor the warranty on our expensive LED taillights, which are still legal but look unappealing due to a handful of LEDs out on each one.

We need to be in Anacortes by Tuesday evening to look at some more boats and be in place for Trawler Fest, so we will try to wrap everything up here by mid-day Tuesday. With any luck, enough of the list will be ticked off by then that we will not have to swing back here after the show, but we are leaving that possibility open if need be.

For the rail fans

There is a short spur of the Union Pacific railroad that runs along the parking lot at Infinity Coach. About once a week, a train pulls a car or two to the factory across the street. It leaves about an hour later. I videoed the train from Odyssey's bedroom.




Our cats aren't impressed by much, but Angel did sit up and take notice. She wasn't nervous, though. Full-timer cats see a lot of heavy equipment.