Touch of Class

On February 24th we went back to the Navel Air Museum to finish touring it.  There was a trolley ride that takes you out on the tarmac where they have more planes plus there is another fort there and a light house we haven’t seen yet.

We just missed the trolley when we arrived so we started out by checking out the top floor.  The planes have a different view from above

Navel Museum from above

Base Camp

I’ll add some more pictures on the points of interest page.  We finished the tarmac trolley ride.  That was interesting  but you couldn’t get out of the trolley so…. We just got back in the car to go see the fort or the light house when we got a call from our Minnesota neighbors, Dave and Sue (I won’t even attempt to spell their last name :)).  They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, come see the condo they are renting.  We’ll have to stop back at the museum and finish it some other day.  They have a really nice condo they are renting and we had a fun time visiting with them.

As I’ve said before, there are some fabulous places to walk to.  One of the paths had signs warning us of alligators

In this section there is a bigger pool and they have a fence with like chicken wire by the fence so the alligators can’t get thru the split rail fence but you can look for the alligators.  We have walked down the path for several days looking for the mama alligator and her babies.  One day were were looking on the sides into the water when a pair of bikes went by.  Both of them slammed on their brakes, mama alligator was right by the fence.  Both the people and the alligator were scared.  I went to check it out and look

Alligator eyes

Our vigilance has finally paid off.  We finally saw the alligator!  We actually saw her a few more times and her babies but the pictures aren’t much better.  That is ok, that is as close as I want to get to one of those :).

Mardi Gras is coming up soon, they celebrate it here too. Actually while Mardi Gras is not observed nationally across the country, a number of cities and regions in the U.S. have Carnival celebrations, because of the French, Spanish, and other colonial influences on the settlements over their history. The earliest organized Carnival celebrations occurred in Mobile, Biloxi, New Orleans, and Pensacola, which have each developed separate traditions.  Hopefully we’ll have some pictures, stay tuned 🙂

For those of you missing out on the wonderful weather that is Minnesota, here are some pictures to let you know how lucky you are

All pretty to look at but so are the green leaves.  I won’t complaint too much about the all day rain, I am just thankful it wasn’t snow 🙂 Watch out for flooding in the spring.

It is raining here so I thought I would catch up on the blog.    On the 17th we went to a beach that is right by the inlet coming in from the gulf.  There are lots of walkways on this beach area and there is free parking and rest rooms there.

Beach by inlet

More beach

Gary on walkway to beach

I know , you are thinking, what?  More beach pictures?  Do they do anything else besides go to the beach? Hey, we’re boat people, we live on the water, we like the water and we are staying at Orange BEACH.  What else did you expect?

To break things up, here is a picture of the full  moon over Fisher’s, the resteraunt in our marina

Moon

How about a little education?  Remember when I asked what this was?

Bird Houses

Well I found out what they are at a Lowes down here

Purple Martin House

And here is a picture of the bird

Now we all know.

Have a wonderful day, I hear a nap calling my name 🙂

This was originally, Things my motorcycle taught me, that we got in an Email from my brother, Tim.  Gary tweeked it a little for boating.  Hope you enjoy it.

Hi All !

Today is Tuesday January 7th. I know it has been terribly cold in Minnesota, but you have insulation and real heaters. We survived the coldest weather the Touch of Class has ever encountered while we have been living aboard. This morning right before Sunrise the temp outside was 9.3 Degrees, and every system on the boat was up and running. I was totally amazed the Fresh Water lines on the boat did not freeze overnight and our heating systems were able to keep us warm. The water temp is 42 degrees, so with one Electric heater on full in the Engine Room it stayed about 45 Degrees, while the rest of the boat was 62° max during the night. We were able to run one marine air/heat and three electric heaters without overwhelming our dockside power. The windows have a layer of ice on the bottom of the glass, and the rear sliding door gets hard to operate due to ice build up in the track. We also kept all the cabinet doors open under the sinks where there was liquid supplies. Today we will be seeing an up swing  in temps, and by tomorrow we will be able to travel. Wednesday temps are predicted to be a balmy 38° hi and 26° lo.  We have 448 miles to get us to Mobile bay and about 50-60 miles more to Orange Beach Alabama.  With the exception of a small deck leak we have been trying to find in the forward stateroom, and one marine air/heat unit in the pilot house on the blink, the boat has been serving us well.

Take care everyone and stay warm.

P.S. I thought this post went thru, my bad 🙂

So…..how many of you were paying attention?  Who caught the aardvark – armadillo swich-a-rooie?  That is what happens when you retire?  You think you are saying the proper word and your not.  I better get more brain games 🙂

It was another sunny day today so we decided to check out another section of the beach.  We had taken a drive the day before and spotted this beach

Beach

so we came back and had our lunch.  It was pretty windy so we were able to watch people kite flying

Kite 1

Kite 2

Kite 3

No, that is not poop coming from the kites, that is that spot that is somewhere on the camera lens.  I think I’ll have to take it in somewhere and see if they can get rid of it.  Sorry 🙂

You can tell by this picture that the sand has really be pushed back toward the shore

Stairs to Beach

They had these nice little spots where you could walk on the beach or sit under cover at the picnic tables.

Nice Place to sit

Periodically, they have flag flying to show you the beach conditions like the yellow flag in the picture above.  Here is a list

Warning flags

The top one, with two red flags is “water closed to public.  The one red flag means “High Hazard – high surf and strong currents”.  The yellow one means “Medium hazard”, the green flag means “low hazard” and the purple flag means “Dangerous Marine Life”.  I don’t exactly know what “Dangerous Marine Life” is, probably sharks or jelly fish.  Doesn’t matter, water is too cold for me to go into no matter what color the flags are 🙂

Here is a funny sign I saw at a launch ramp not too far from the marina

Funny Sign

:), of course it doesn’t take much to amuse the feeble.

Well, time for Gary and I to hug and smooch.  Hopefully you enjoyed your Valentines day too.

Hi!  Miss us? :).  We have been busy relaxing and seeing what this place has to offer.  On the 9th the weather was so nice here we decided to go to the beach.

Gary on the beach

Gary is sitting next to his invisible wife, Colleen.  Love the blue shoes ;).  The sun was at such an angle that I could sit there with my biggest hat on and my face was total in the shade.  The warmth of the sun felt really nice for a change.

Pier on Beach

This beach access is about a mile from the marina.  See the pier in this picture?  It is a good place where I can be in the shade and Gary can be in the sun.  The first time we visited this spot there was a square drone helicopter that was flying up and down the beach.  We couldn’t see anyone running it and it went such a long distance, it must have been a really expensive one or it was Big Brother keeping an eye on us 🙂

We were reminded that spring break starts in March so we figured we better enjoy the empty beach while we could.  Although I am sure Gary won’t mind watching the young things that will be walking around on the beach LOL.  Hey, he ain’t dead yet!

On the 10th, we went to the Navel Air museum in Pensacola, FL.  We are really close to the Florida border and heard this museum was really cool.  I have posted some pictures on the “Points of Interest Page”  It was free to get in.  They give guided tours every couple of hours.  We had a really good guy who’s name was Oz Nunn.  The tour was only suppose to last for 1 1/2 hours but he had so many interesting things to say about the many planes we looked at that his tour lasted 2 hours.  He was really good.

We also did a little more walking along the beach before we headed back to the boat.  Here is an inlet for the Gulf

Gulf Entrance

There were quite a few people fishing from the shore there.  I think Gary is going to have to get his fishing license pretty soon and catch us some dinner.

On the 13th we did a couple of things.  There are some really nice trails about a mile from the marina.

Trail Map

Here are the trail maps.  There are benches that have been donated by various people and organizations and the trails are marked every 1/4 mile.  Nice black topped walkways

Heading down the trail

Besides the people you see on the trail, we saw an aardvark!

Aardvark eating

Aardvark side view

This is the first time I’ve seen a live one, usually they are road kill on the side of the road.  He really didn’t seem to mind us.  He was foraging for food and we weren’t going to get in his way.

When we go to the end of the trail, there was a nice little swing to sit and relax

End of Trail

I guess I am working Gary too hard :).

Next we went to the Gulf State Park Pier.  We had heard you could go there to get a fishing license and they would also have a book with the rules and reg of fishing plus show what kind of fish to fish for.  Cause you know, fishing is different all over the country.  We might think carp are nasty fish but in another part of the country they will have another name for them and they think they are fabulous.

Entrance to the Park

I know that is a fake turtle but apparently during the summer you can come here and watch the baby sea turtles hatch and head toward the ocean.  Cool!

Park Pier

This is the walk way to the pier.  It costs $2 per person to walk out on the pier.  We are on a budget now so we skipped the walk and just took pictures from the building here, cheap, cheap 🙂

Picture from Pier, for free 🙂

Look at the nice picture I got, and it didn’t cost me a penny.  There were two girls under the pier in summer dresses and barefoot getting their picture taken as they stood in the waves.  It wasn’t really that warm and I know the water was cold.  You could tell their feet were freezing.  Boy….what you have to do to make a living now a days.

When we got back to the marina we saw some of our boating neighbors had hired a diver to clean the bottom of their boats

Diver

That guy dressed in black standing on the dock is the diver.  We will have to hire one too before we leave.  As the boat sits in the salt water, all sorts of creatures attach to our boat bottom.  These creatures will slow down the boat so you must have a diver clean them off.  That boat, Sundancer, that they are working on, was a shrimp boat that was never an official shrimper.  They gave us a tour the other day…..nice boat.  The previous owner enclosed the back part and they had to cut a few parts off that a shrimper would use.  They even had a piano in it!  Wow!  One of the nice things of having a shrimp boat is when you go thru the locks, they think you are a commercial boat and they let you thru before the pleasure boats.  Sneaky, huh?

That was a full day.  The weather seems to be turning for the better.  Keep warm you people up north, it can’t keep snowing for ever…..can it?

Today, some new friends we have met at the marina, Ken and Brenda, (they did the loop a few years ago and had their own blog. Their blog, if you are interested, is at http://www.tellicolady.com), Ray and Delila and Ben and Sharon all went to visit Fort Morgan.  I put some information on that under the Points of Interest page if you want to look at that.  It was good to get out of the boat and do some exploring not to mention to eat a lunch I didn’t have to prepare :).

We decided to go get our van from Aqua for the 5th and 6th.  We got a 2 day rental from Hertz for $68.51 which we didn’t think was bad, $30 a day.  We decided to make it a two day adventure.  It was kind of cloudy both days but not much rain so it was good traveling weather.  Gary and I always enjoy a good road trip, lots to look at and comment on.  It took us about 7 hours to get to Aqua.  We picked up the van and then drove for two hours before we stopped at a Days Inn in West Point, MS, for the night, $63.22.  Again, not a bad price and we got a free breakfast that included cold decaf coffee for myself…..yum!  We decided to stop at a gas station so we could fill the cars and I could get my coffee. I went in to get my coffee after we filled up.  Hmmmmm.  Two orange coffee pots.  I have never seen JUST decaf….anywhere.  So I ask if there is decaf in the pots.  No, the girl says, no one ever wants decaf!  So I settle for diet root beer and a water.  What’s a girl to do?  We have a pretty uneventful ride home except for a few things.  I looked in my rear view mirror and watched as this white car weaved back and forth between both lanes.  The car was quite a ways behind me so I wasn’t too concerned about them hitting me.  Then all of a sudden the car started speeding up and getting closer.  When it passed me a hugged the shoulder and keep an eagle eye on the car to make sure it didn’t swing into my lane.  I was going to warn Gary who was in the lead but thought I better wait until the car passed him so he wasn’t distracted.  The car passed him and you could hear the noise from his tires as they hit the bumps they put on the shoulder of the road.  He made it past Gary so I called Gary and told him to watch out for that guy.  He drove in front of us, weaving and a dodging for quite a while, then a truck that was in front of him signaled that he was turning right, the white car signaled he was turning right too.  Whew!  Glad that car will be off the road.  Gary and I pass both cars and continue down the highway.  I glance in my rear view mirror again.  What the heck?  The white car didn’t turn right!  Crazy!  He started back down the highway again.  After a few more miles of weaving and dodging, he finally got off the highway.  Good luck getting home buddy.

We got back to Orange Beach safe and sound.  The next day was going to be house cleaning day.  Oh Boy!  Gary and I have come up with a list (a list?  Really?  You two anal people have a list?  What a novel idea :)) that show different things that should be done on the boat monthly, quarterly etc, etc.  We were going to do our quarterly items even though 5 months had passed.  So we did things like change our water filter on our hose

New water filter

We checked and cleaned the shower sump pump

Inspecting sump pump

Cleaning sump pump

I helped too!  I held up the carpet and padding so Gary could get to the sump.  Man, that is a nasty job.  Think of your shower drain.  All the soapy hair and gunk, ish!  Of course Mr. Smokie just had to supervise us

Get to work you lazy human

He always has to watch intently no matter what we do.  Now I see where the saying “curiosity killed the cat” came from.  He does some pretty stupid stuff just to see what we are doing to to see what is going on.  He is lucky he has us humans to keep him safe.

We got all of our chores done and I updated our list to show that when we did our checks and maintenance.  Good, all done for another 3 months.

Now that we have our car here we have just been checking things out.  I found out the McDonald’s also don’t have decaf coffee drinks.  Man, I miss Caribou 🙂 If we do anything more exciting, I’ll post it here.  Otherwise, enjoy the winter where ever you are and thanks for the continued interest in our adventure.

We went grocery shopping on the 27th in preparation for being locked into our boat for the next two to three days.  We wanted to make sure we had enough booze and HoHo’s to get us thru this ordeal :).  The night of the 27th all was calm.  The cat, Smokie had his eye on something out back

What you watchin Smoke?

I looked out the window

Hank

Oh!  Hank has decided to sit a spell on our neighbors swim platform.  Let hope he doesn’t leave a nasty surprise for them 🙂

We went to bed that night after listening to the weather and the threat of ice and snow.  Luckily, it looks like we will dodge the bullet.  It is only suppose to rain where we are because we are so close to the Gulf.

Ice on neighbors boat

Wrong!  We ended up getting the freezing rain here.  I thought I moved south so I didn’t have to put up with this s@#& again.  Poop, double poop!  So for today we sat inside and watched the freezing rain pile up on things

Ice on our bike cover and the dock

Frozen water on our dingy cover

and listen to the non-stop news about how Alabama, Georgia and Florida were going to handle this ice and snow.  I know they don’t have the equipment or resources to handle this kind of weather but I still got a chuckle out of some of the things that they did.  They shut down the schools, government and business.  They ended up closing most of the bridges.  Some people were actually trapped on the islands they lived on.  They showed tips on how to get the ice off of the cars, some I had actually never heard of.  Who’d a thunk that the southern people could teach the northern people about how to get ice off their windshield.  The news people showed a woman standing on a bridge, hitting the ice on the bridge with her ice scrapper, not a car in sight.  They showed how they put the sand on the streets, a dump truck just dumping sand, without a spreader.  There was so much sand on the street it looked like the beach.  Then they showed another dump truck with two guys in the back, the guys were using shovels to shovel and spread the sand out of the truck.  I felt bad for them but it was funny to look at.  Can you imagine them doing that in Minnesota?  Holy crap, we might as well hibernate for the winter months.  The news station showed one big dude, who was from Colorado, he had a big white beard, a wife beater T-shirt, shorts and tennis on.  He had his truck stopped on the side of the road and he was helping people get unstuck.  He’d either push them or he got in the vehicle and spun it around so they could go back where they were coming from.  What a good Samaritan!

We stayed in the boat for 2 days, drank our booze, ate our Ho-Ho’s, watched the news and watched the ice accumulate on things in the marina

Ice on the gas dock

Ice on our railings

Ice covered Isinglass

Finally, on the night of the 29th

Pink Sky in the night, Sailors delight

By the time we woke up on the 30th, the freezing weather was over but everything was still ice covered.  It was especially bad for the palm trees

Poor Palm Tree 😦

We waited for the ice to melt on the docks before we got off the boat.  Around noon, it was melted enough that we could venture out.  Then we got the heck out of there and headed for the beach

Gary on the Beach

It was still chilly but look……no snow…..no freezing rain…..Oh Boy!

We survived our first, and hopefully our last ice storm, in Orange beach.

Stay warm you people in the tundra, only 40 days till spring.  Hang in there, you can do it!

Gary discovered a leak in our port (left) upper cabinet in our VIP room.  That is the last thing you want on your boat is a leak, we are none to happy :(.

We first discovered it because water was coming in and getting the carpet wet.  Gary went down and removed all the staples holding the vinyl on, and there were a lot of them.   He found out that the water was running in behind the vinyl wall covering but he didn’t know the source of it.  Was it the cleat?  Was it the rub rail?  Was it the stanchion?  So many things with screws, what is a boater to do?  He was able to dry everything out and locate the source of the water.    It appears that the compartment that housed the anchor was where the water was seeping in.  By drilling a hole thru the wall, he was able to suck quite a bit of water out using my turkey baster.  He sucked the water out every time it rained, and man, it sure seemed to rain a lot, what the heck?  I was still waiting for those sunny warm days I was suppose to get once I moved further south.  Doesn’t look like that is happening this year.  We feel like a jinx.  Everywhere we go we drag cold air with us.  Maybe when we go visit our friends in southern Florida they will pay us not to come 🙂

Well back to the leak…..when we were settled in at Orange Beach, Gary decided to do some more investigation

Gary, getting ready to investigate

I tell you what, the head lamps we got from Ron and Diane have come in handy.  It is surprising how many time you need to stick you head in some dark spot and these little lights work really well.  I use them all the time to check out my nooks and crannys :).  So with the help of the head lamps and some poking around

Gary Fixing Leak

Gary was able to fix the leak.  YAH!  No more water coming in.  I am sooooo thankful that he is such handy guy.

Now that that crisis was diverted, we are able to go for another nice walk.  We have many nice places to walk around here.  The fact that is is flat around here, makes it even better.  Although the hills of Aqua got our heart pumping, we have more interesting places to walk here which keep the interest alive.  Here are some things we saw on one of our walks

Road in front of marina

On this road in front of the maria, if you go to the left for about 1/2 mile you’ll come to a boat ramp. You can come here on the weekends and see quite a bit of activity with boats coming and going and watching boats coming and going is always fun :).

If you go to the right when you leave the marina, for about a mile and 1/2, there is a park across the street that has a bunch of walking an biking trails.  I have heard it is wonderful and we still need to check that out.

Once to get to the end of this road, if you go to the left for 1/4 mile, you’ll find the beach

Gary on the Beach

I know he has a coat and hat on but it does get cold down here too :).  There are also 2 grocery stores, a CVS Pharmacy, a Wal-Mart with groceries plus a bunch of other stuff all relatively close.   That is why we like this place so much.  And did I tell you about the great sidewalks and bike trials they have?  Very nice.  I guess that is why the sales tax is 10% on everything here.  They have to get the money from somewhere, might as well charge the people that are using the amenities.

What kind of vegetation do they have here do you ask?  Along with the many types of palm trees and plant here, there are also quite a few pine trees here.  The pine trees drop pine cones and their big needles, I am talking 6 or 7 inches, all over the place.  So if anyone is interested in pine cones for some artsy crafty thing, they have a ton of them here

Bunch of Pine Cones

Big Pine Cones

And they are big so if you decide you want some, let me know and I’ll bring a bag home for you next time we visit Minnesota.

Now we are hunkering down for the biggest snow/ice storm they have had here in years.  Sounds like they will be closing schools, business and government.  We’ll be trapped on our boat until it is over.  So stay tuned to see if we survive the big storm of 2014……..