I thought I would update this blog every now and again if I had some interesting things to share.

There are a few nice areas to walk around in.  Plenty of hills that really give you a good work out.  We try to walk these every day to get some exercise and hopefully before not too long we won’t be huffin and puffin when we get to the top to the hills :).  Here are a few pictures of one of the streets we walk on

Walking path

I also saw some big, and weird to me, mushrooms

Big mushroom by my blue shoe

Like my blue Crocs?  They match my MV Touch of Class T-shirt.  Must coordinate ya know 🙂

Big Mushroom

BTW, I know these are cool mushrooms cause I saw another woman taking pictures of them too, so there!

The exercise equipment here is a little disappointing.  Of course I have belonged to a gym for the past 5 years so I have been spoiled.  The weight equipment looks pretty good but the tread mill and other equipment are pretty banged up and loose. Apparently the marina has had trouble with the neighboring people/kids who don’t belong in the marina, getting in and they mess up the equipment and even stealing it.  That is really too bad.

Here are some pictures of the piers for this marina.  They are quite long.  As we need a bigger slip, we are far out on the end.  We have decided to stay here for at least a year so we rented slip G52 until 12/31/2014.  We figured we should live here for a full year to see what the weather is like year round before we can decide if we want to stay here longer.  We are still taking the boat down further south in January thru April, but by having an annual lease we will be assured a slip to bring the boat back to and also have a place to leave our van if we need to.  Here are a couple of pictures of pier G where we have the boat

Pier F and G

Pier G and the Gas Dock

Our slip faces the East and the gas dock.  We have decided to back in as the fingers are pretty narrow and our neighbor to our north has their steps on the dock and they practically take up the whole finger.  Gary does a good job getting the boat backed in.  It is more difficult especially if you are not used to it.  I stand on the back of the boat and we put on our head set so we can talk to each other.  I tell him which way to go so he doesn’t hit the dock and then when to stop to he doesn’t back in too far.  We’ve had to back in twice now and it seems to work pretty well.  I’m sure we’ll get more practice the longer we stay here.

With the slip we are in, when we sit in the pilot house, we have an excellent view of the gas dock.  We had an even better view of the gas dock at our slip at Sunnyside.  I’m sure this one here will provided hours of entertainment as we watch inexperience boaters attempt to dock at the gas dock.  Very similar to the fireworks on the 4th of July, lots of oooohs and aaaaaahs and WOWs :), but a few more OUCHs and Holy Crap, Did You See That????  I can hardly wait for summer to come ;).

Insect Poop

Here is a picture of some interesting insect poop.  It looks like a chocolate Dairy Queen.  They stick out as shown and are/were all over the boat.  We are hoping they were from the bugs at Green Turtle and not from the bugs here, only time will tell.  Insect poop is a major problem of all boaters.  Whether it be spider poop, which is little black circles that are very hard to get off and can stain your canvas, or the blue poop from some new and unusual insect that showed up at Sunnyside this year.  Again, hard to clean.  See the problem us boaters have 🙂

Kumbaya Floating Again

Here is the boat we mentioned earlier, Kumbaya.  They are apparently fixed and ready to continue their adventure.  We hope they make it and have better luck and no mishaps.

Hanging Dingy

Here is an unusual way to keep your dingy (a dingy is a small boat that the bigger boats have so when they are at anchor, they can take the dingy ashore for provisions or cocktails. Whoops, did I say cocktails?  I just meant pop  :). Several marina’s even have dingy docks where people can park their boat while they are ashore).  After careful examination, we figured this contraption must have been added at the time the dock was built.  What a great idea.  Keeps the dingy hull clean and he even has enough room to drop the dingy next to big boat and get it out of the slip.  Good idea as long as it doesn’t fall 😦

Burned Boat

This boat was severely burned on the starboard (right) side.  We first saw this boat about 5 years ago when we were in the area looking at a boat and stopped into Aqua to check it out.  I didn’t want to be too obvious when taking the picture so you can’t see where the gel-coat is still all bubbly and flaky on the fly bridge.  That long tear drop thing should have a fiberglass insert over it, that is what the black line is, probably a glue line to hold on the missing part.  They have brown Styrofoam stuffed in the holes.  Pretty bad-looking.  You’d think by now they would have had it fixed.

Listing boat

Here is a boat that needs to shift its contents around a little so it is not leaning so much 🙂

Yesterday we took the boat out for a little ride to warm up the engines so Gary could change the oil.  We went out to Pickwick lake.

Pickwick Lake

Not a very good picture but you can see that the leaves are changing nicely down here.  There are a bunch of little coves all over the place that look really cool for anchoring in.  We will probably check them out with the little boat once we get the hoist on the back. There is one cove with a water fall in it.  We checked that one out, I wouldn’t really call it a waterfall.  There is water coming out of the rocks.  We had the same thing at Sunnyside but these are just higher up.  Maybe there is more of a flow in the summer, we’ll have to wait and see.

We were finally able to get the Marina people and the people who have the davit we want together so they could figure things out and order the davit.  We have our little boat on the back of our boat but no way to get it down unless of course if the boat sinks, which we hope will not happen!  The ball has been rolling so hopefully it will be installed before we leave for the south.

We have talked to Tim and Martha and Tim will be traveling down to get us on the 14th or so to bring us back up to Minnesota.  We are looking forward to seeing our family and friends in Minnesota.

If you are ever in the area, stop by and see us, ya hear 🙂