#49 Annapolis! And beyond!

Cheryl: There’s Life Out There!

Well, I did it. I got away from the boat for a few days. I flew to South Carolina for my granddaughter’s birthday party-which was not an easy feat. I couldn’t buy a ticket until the week prior because from day-to-day we are never completely certain where we will be. We make travel plans and marina reservations but need to travel when the weather tells us to travel. So, reservations are cut short, extended, or skipped altogether to accommodate wind, rain, waves, tides, and currents. Guessing which airport to fly out of is risky business. Once I was fairly certain which airport I’d have access to, I bought a ticket. We ended up in Havre De Grace, an adorable little town. However, there were no rental cars available on my travel days and Uber isn’t a given there. So, I hired a private driver (Patrick) to take me to and from the airport. There’s always a way. Some folks we’ve met have said they plan to fly home one week each month. I wonder how that is working out for them because planning this trip was pretty darn stressful (not to mention expensive) for me.

All of that aside, the most remarkable part of my trip was realizing that even though Butch and my life is consumed with weather reports, keeping the boat running, getting fuel, dumping out tanks, obtaining provisions, and meeting other Loopers- hidden from our view, life goes on as usual all around us. There are still traffic jams, kids that need to be picked up from school, people running late for work, people actually working, busy shopping centers, and yes, birthday parties. Being exposed to “real life” after 6 to 7 months on the water was a cultural shock. I’m beginning to really love life on the water. I know it can’t last forever, but a part of me wishes it could and I’m not ashamed of that.

Butch: Sometimes things happens in life that you just would not imagine. The other day we took the dingy over to downtown Annapolis and on the way back, my wallet fell out of my back pocket and into the drink. I didn’t even realize it until we were back at the boat. I thought, no way is that ever getting found, it’s on the bottom of Annapolis Bay. So I resigned myself to a lot of phone calls getting everything replaced. Normally I keep my phone and wallet in a dry bag clipped to the inside of the dingy, but we use the dingy enough that I got complacent.

The part that’s hard to imagine is that about 30 minutes later, the phone rang. A sailor had found my wallet floating by and grabbed it, getting our number from the MoonShine boat card in it. I didn’t even have to relaunch the dink to go get it, the water taxi driver offered to stop by my rescuer’s sailboat and pick it up and bring it back here. Which all happened. I had it back inside about an hour. Damp, but I had it back. Is that some crazy luck or what? Many many thanks to Jesse on the sailboat Longer Layover!

Annapolis is said to be the sailing capitol of the country, and wow, I can believe it. Just about every mile of shoreline in the two bays here are filled with marinas, and those marinas are filled with tens and tens of thousands of sailboats. In Tennessee, finding a craftsman who can fix something on your boat is just about impossible. Here, boat repair businesses are as common as Dollar Generals at home. That would be very convenient, except the boat is in fine shape and needs nothing other than a good polish and wax job.

We had sort of another adventure our last day in Annapolis. We took the water taxi over to downtown and had lunch, did a tour, then hopped on the water taxi to get back to the boat. Well, by then the wind was blowing like stink (if you have been reading these updates you know what that means) and the swell was coming right in the bay. Like four-five feet. The guy driving did a good job slowing down for the biggest waves, but we all got soaked. Fun, right?

During our visit we learned a lot of local history, and there is a lot of that in Annapolis. One tidbit was that Benjamin Franklin ran aground on a sand bar just a few hundred yards from where we were docked, and had to spend the night on the boat before getting pulled off. Today there’s a warning aid to navigation marker there. Oh yeah, and there’s a Navy Academy here with John Paul Jones’ crypt as well as the grave of Senator John McCain, Annapolis is the oldest state capitol still in continuous use and was once the US Capitol, George Washington resigned his commission here, and it was the very first colony to issue paper currency. All interesting, but hey, Ben Franklin ran aground!

The right hand photo is the dingy dock in downtown Annapolis, our dingy is in the middle there. I learned as we stepped ashore that at this very spot in 1767, Alex Haley’s gggg grandfather, a Mandinka warrior from The Gambia, also stepped ashore and was sold into slavery. And so, 200 years later, we got the novel and the movie “Roots”. Regardless of the liberties Haley took with the biographical parts of the book, you have to stop and think for a moment about the inhumanity of that period in our history. Coincidentally, Haley ended up living his last years on a farm in Clinton, TN, not too far from where I live.

Didn’t see the for sale sign as we went by, darn, this might make a nice second home!

https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/newport-news/historic-middle-ground-lighthouse-goes-up-for-sale

We stopped in Havre De Grace, Maryland, for a couple of days. This is the quintessential stop for a Looper. It’s a small town with a population of about 15,000, and has that great small-town feel. A lot of history as well. One example, HdG was in the running to be the nation’s Capital in 1789 thanks to its location on the Susquehanna river. Cheryl calls it “adorable” and that fits. It’s flat out charming. Clean, neat, everyone is friendly, the shopping district is just across the street from the marina, the homes are gorgeous, (there are over 800 historical homes or buildings in town), there are numerous parks, very walkable, and the list goes on. A free trolley around town. Cafes and book stores and art shops. And of course a diner, my favorite kind of breakfast stop:

There is an interesting thing going on with this Looping way of travel. On the one hand, you have these interesting fun stops, exciting discoveries and great diners and parks to walk and all the rest that comes with these small towns along the way. It’s a genuine pleasure to drop into these places and explore around. One the other hand, the day we traveled here, we bashed into three-four foot swells for a couple of hours before we got into calmer water. Was NOT fun. Even I don’t enjoy that anymore, and I used to love crashing through waves, the bigger the better. This way of travel can be work! I have to keep the boat running and safe, and Cheryl is constantly working to keep things clean and organized. And yet, if you eliminated the hard part, the waves and the rain and the expenses and the worry when the boat makes a noise, the work it involves keeping us in supplies, if you avoided all that by simply flying here and renting a car to drive around, it would be probably be just another boring seaside town with the same old same old shops. Somehow getting here on your own, overcoming serious obstacles to do it, makes every landing and every small town an adventure. It’s great.

Havre De Grace is indeed special, however. It’s one of the cleanest and most interesting stops we’ve made. Every place has its charms, but HdG stands out. Some places are just too big. Savannah was cool, but it did not have this small-town ambience we so enjoy here. Key West is in a class of its own. Charlestown was also cool, but crowded and noisy. Some places are designed to clean out your wallet. And yet, as we travel this Loop, we continue to discover these charming little towns along the way, where it feels like life can be more appreciated than in the city, where tension is not the primary social medium, places where one can imagine buying a historical house and living out one’s days. No, I’m not planning on that, but as you walk around beautiful tree-lined avenues with stately homes on each side, the thought crosses your mind.

Then I saw a fire hydrant with a fiberglass pole mounted on it, so that the snowplows can avoid hitting it during the winter. Uh, no thanks, not living here!!

Some pictures: Many of the building and some homes had artwork displayed. Added a nice festive feeling to the town.

There are parks all over town, with one dedicated to horse racing, which used to be huge here. The track is now offices. Remember the name “Seabiscuit”? Books and a movie were made about that horse. There is also a duck decoy museum here.

Little parks and interesting architecture all around.

Of course I had to look up why Maryland is shaped like it is, practically narrowing to nothing at one point, only 1.8 miles across at the pinch point. I learned that Maryland’s pinched and fragmented shape is the result of 17th-century colonial surveying errors, inaccurate maps, political rivalries, and centuries of lost border disputes with neighboring states.

One evening in Havre De Grace we walked over to an Irish Pub and had dinner with Looping friends from Wade-ing Away and Tug Along. The next day Cheryl and I went to the maritime museum here, but it was closed, so instead we walked into this wooden boat restoration shop and got to talk with these guys, who where all in the process of restoring classic wooden boats. Look at those woodworking tools in the background. Some of them are one hundred years old.

Leaving Havre De Grace. Check out that water, it was a perfect traveling day.

As I write we are in Delaware City, DE, our tenth state, waiting out what looks to be a 3 day weather window. And once again we’re getting in our daily walking, look at that dock! Why are we at the end? Did they think we were going to have a wild party?

This little town, Delaware City, looks interesting, there is a folk music concert here Friday, and of course we found a diner/cafe. Check out those drinks. When’s the last time you saw a Fanta? Or a Stewart’s rootbeer? (Cane sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup)

That last post I said I’d post some video of the locks we’ll be going through in Canada, and I forgot. They’re posted below. Amazing engineering. We won’t get there until late June, I think, but I wanted to show you what crazy stuff is coming.

“One who has seen a thousand sunsets
Each unique and unrepeatable
Has little interest
In society’s attempts
To package, price and sell
Baubles it calls beautiful.”