"See You on the Other Side"

At Shelter Bay, we hear it alot. It conjures unnerving images of people in matching tennis shoes and large batches of Kool-Aid. But, no, no cult activity implied or intended, just a 47 or so mile trip up three locks, across a lake and a cut and then down three locks to the other side (in our case, the Pacific side) of Panama.

Ready to go!

Municipal Chickens: 5 Things That Make it Key West

San Francisco's got it.  So does New Orleans.  Boulder has its own version of it. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo have glimmers of it. New York doesn't need it; ditto L.A., they've got other things going for them.  Chicago tries to get it, but can't quite. Milwaukee just tries to be Chicago. There are others, but you get the idea. I call it "ititude." It's that je ne sais quoi, that singular, yet still not quite definable character of a place that makes it a destination. There's an ethos about places with ititude that makes you want to go back, rather than go somewhere new, vacation after vacation. You start to think of yourself as a part-time resident. Gradually, you begin to patronizing the bars and restaurants the locals frequent. You half-seriously consider retiring there. You get homesick when you get back home.

Pete's 18th Annual 50th Birthday Party: A Pilgrimage of Sorts

We have sailed to Little Harbour to attend a party in honor of Peter Johnston's 50th birthday.  We have never met Pete, as far as we know, and it's not really his 50th birthday and the whole affair is just an excuse to raise funds for a charitable organization known as "Every Child Counts."   ECC is a philanthropic organization which, without benefit of governmental funding, seeks to provide educational opportunities for children with developmental disabilities.  Pete's "birthday" is one of several annual fundraisers they hold.

We're that much more happy to attend the party knowing that the proceeds are going for a worthy cause, but it is not really the reason we're going.  We first discovered Pete's Pub in the summer of 2008.  We'd decided to rent a car and drive the length of Abaco just to see what there was to see.  Pete's Pub and Gallery was listed in the guidebooks and online as a not-to-be-missed stop and so, we didn't.  At the time, vehicular access to Pete's Pub seemed recent.  Something about the 2+ mile extension cord which T'd off the main highway and provided electricity to the pub, gallery and the rest of the Little Harbour community.

My Last Landlubber Birthday

Ean at the helm

This morning we woke up at the Villa Paradiso Hotel in Miami Beach, Fl.  Tonight we are going to sleep at home in Milwaukee.  In between these two events, we celebrated my 49th birthday--mostly at the airport, due to a several hour flight delay.  Our main reason for this trip wasn’t to look at boats, as it happens.  Our main reason was so that I wouldn’t have to be cold on my birthday.  Unfortunately, due to scheduling constraints, I did end up being cold for part of it.  But any birthday hour spent somewhere warm is better than that same hour spent cold, so I take whatever I can get.

We flew into Ft. Lauderdale and immediately hightailed it for St. Augustine in our rental car.  Not our smartest move considering that we were driving on about 4 hours’ sleep.  Ultimately worth it, though.  St. Augustine is nicknamed “The Ancient City” and has the distinction of being the oldest city in the U.S.  It’s a great walking city with Spanish architecture, streets and streets of shops (in one of which Jane found the perfect sun hat and in another one of which I got my Tilley), and attractions such as the restored St. Augustine lighthouse and the Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish Fort that, despite many turnovers in local government over the centuries (The Spanish, the British, the Spanish again, etc.), had never been taken over by force, only by treaty.

St. Augustine also has a beautifully maintained municipal marina, wherefrom we went on our first catamaran ride.  Not on a cruising cat, however, this was a 27 foot racing cat owned by St. Augustine Eco-Tours.  Beside Captain Aaron, just 2 sisters shared our two-hour dolphin-spotting tour of the inlet leading to the ICW.  It turns out that Aaron and his family live aboard their boat, so we had a lot to talk about.  Considering it was our first time aboard a cat underway, it didn’t feel new at all, really.  Just one more experience to further convince us that we’re making the right decision.

Let the Bye-byes Begin

Milwaukee, we have to admit, has its charms, though few and far between they may be--at least for us.  In acknowledgement of this we have, under the category of "regret minimization," compiled a list of places we want to go and things we want to see before we say "fare thee well" to this part of the world.

exotic specimens--for now

One of the items on our list is the Mitchell Park Conservatory, a.k.a. "The Domes" named for the triple geodesic dome-shaped structures in which are housed various biospheres.  We have turned this into an annual pilgrimage at about this time for each of the past several years.  Our trips generally coincide with that discrepant period between calendrical and actual spring, when we become driven to distraction by our need for warmth and humidity and green--signs of life that the out-of-Domes world won't produce for weeks yet.