Road trip!! (Posted 10/22/2011)

On September 28th we moved the boat from the mooring in Punta Gorda into a slip at the Laishley Park Municipal Marina and prepared her so that we could go on our trip. With everything secured and lashed down Enchantress was as ready for any tropical storms or hurricanes as we could make her. Fortunately, there were no major storms while we were away for the next three weeks although there were a couple of significant wind and rain events.

On October 1st we drove north.  At lunch time a friend, Lucy, met us at the Cracker Barrel on I-75 and we had a nice lunch and visit with her.  Then we drove on to Live Oak in northern Florida where Linda had lived.  We checked into a hotel and that evening we had dinner at the home of some friends of Linda's, Barbara and Richard Barker and their two teenage boys, Brian and Rhett.  It was the first time I had met them after hearing a lot about them from Linda.  We had a great visit and dinner with them. The next day we drove around Live Oak, went shopping, and that evening we had dinner at a restaurant with Shiela and George Burnham, friends of Linda's that I had met on our previous trip north in the boat.  We had a nice visit with them catching up after several years.

After leaving Live Oak we drove north into Georgia and past Atlanta to Gainesville, Georgia and Lake Lanier.  You can take the sailor away from the water but you can't take the water away from the sailors. Sooo.....of course, we just had to drive down to Lake Lanier that evening before checking into a hotel.  Lake Lanier is a huge lake and I had read about it in sailing magazines.  There was a marina with very large sailboats. It wasn't the ocean but it WAS water and sailboats!!!!

The next day we drove on into the mountains of northern Georgia to visit with Linda's sister, Sally, and her brother-in-law, Jim.  We had visited them a few years ago during the winter and this time we saw the mountains all green and the leaves just starting to change colors.  Sally and Jim retired a few years ago and moved there from Florida.  We enjoyed our visit with them and all their hospitality and seeing them again.  Of course, the two sisters exercised their "shopping genes" while we were there!  We also were able to visit with Martha and John and Claude and Penny again (they also retired there from Florida).  One day we went up to the highest point in Georgia, up on the top of a mountain known as Brass Town Bald.  We didn't see any bears there, the bear story comes later in this blog!

Here is a photo of Linda, Sally and Jim with the lookout tower on Brass Town Bald in the background:

On October 8th we drove to Charlotte, North Carolina so that we could fly out the next day to Connecticut to be there for Amy's birthday.  When we arrived at Amy's house, Olivia and Laura had used chalk to write a welcome sign for us on the driveway and had made us another welcome banner inside the house!  As always we had a great time with them for the next 10 days. There was the usual playing of games, shopping, eating out at restaurants, etc.  The girls had Columbus Day off from school so we were able to have extra time with them that day.

Mark and the girls made Amy a birthday cake and decorated it.  Here is a photo of the girls decorating the cake (very serious business!):

We took Amy to a Japanese restaurant for her birthday. Here is a photo taken at the restaurant on Amy's birthday:

One day in the afternoon, Amy was looking out the window and said, "BEAR!!"  I looked out and right there in the backyard was a big black bear pulling down her new bird feeder! We, of course, grabbed the cameras and video camera.  I went out the sliding glass doors onto the patio and banged pots and pans to scare him away but he didn't flinch or even look up at me!  I decided that charging him while growling loudly was probably not a smart idea, so I didn't. :-)

Here is a photo of the bear:

One day while we were there we had lunch with an old friend of mine who I had worked with. Hadn't seen Curt Johnson in quite a few years so we had a nice lunch and caught up on each other's lives. 

Before we left on the trip Linda had made a costume for Laura for Halloween as she wanted to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz this year.  Here is a photo of Laura in the costume (along with Todo "her little dog too!")

As ususal, we were so busy with the girls that we didn't get to call or see other people we would have like to.  All to soon the visit was over and we had to fly back to Charlotte to get the car and then drive back to Punta Gorda. A two day drive south and we were finally back "home" where Enchantress, palm trees and warm weather were waiting for us.

We had a great vacation, saw a lot of people, and had a wonderful time but we were happy to get back to Enchantress and back on the water.