inauspicio.us

We were without internet access for the first couple of days after launch, so I did my best to document our progress on twitter and flickr. I’ll give you the executive summary now: it is awesome. So awesome I can hardly believe it. It’s even better than I anticipated, and I anticipated a lot of awesome.

After purchasing a CO detector, we spent our first night aboard on Friday. My dad and stepmom visited, and they brought us champagne, and we toasted to an exciting new chapter. Awesome! The furnace kept us toasty warm inside the boat while the outside temperature dipped as low as eighteen degrees with a 25 knot wind.

Yesterday we did lots more shopping; spare parts, hoses, ropes, clips, wrenches, shackles, clamps, and some normal things, like shampoo, soap, food. We’ve tried EVERY DAY to buy a dinghy, so far without luck. We will find one, I’m sure of it. And it will be great. Spacious, lightweight, big capacity, fast, fun, folds up to fit in a pocket, the whole deal. It will be our main method of exploring new harbors, so it needs to be great. Yesterday night my mom, stepdad, and three of our dear friends visited for dinner. That means we had SEVEN people eating dinner comfortably (well, *I* thought it was comfortable) in our living room. Rad.

Last night it was hardly cold at all, only 25 or so, with hardly any wind. We were toasty warm, and woke up to another idyllic morning. My sister visited for breakfast and a nap after an overnight flight, and Steph made scones in our little propane oven. They were indescribably good, even moreso done in our floating kitchen (I mean, “galley”. It’s called a galley now.)

Then Steph and I bent on the sails (that’s a nautical term. It means “attached the sails to the boat”). After two hours wrestling one onto the boom, we realized it was the genoa and had to start from scratch. Even we know that the genoa goes on the front; once we realized which sail was which (they’re devilishly hard to recognize in their little bags, especially when the bags’ labels are reversed) it took only an hour to attach both. Protip: the genoa is heavy! It was no match for our combined strength and cunning, though, and after a brief but exciting time with the sail up and drawing, we furled it in textbook style.

So in short, everything that could possibly be going well is going well. We finished today’s big projects:

• Figure out how to attach the sails to the boat
• Set up the internet (for reference, it’s a Verizon 3g data card hooked up to a Cradlepoint MBR-1000 with a DC adapter cord. The router draws 1.5 amps, and to ease the pain of a 5GB monthly cap, we will probably piggyback a Pepwave Surf Mini onto the Cradlepoint so that we can use WiFi where it is available, only falling back to the 3g where there is no WiFi available.)

And most importantly, we’re having a BLAST. Even Euonym likes it!

Erie, PA is 1450 miles from where we began our journey two mornings ago, but still 548 miles from where we hope to join the Megatron (Note To Self: is “the megatron” correct usage, or simply “megatron”? Must find this out before talking to yachties) in Quincy, MA.

We left Boulder early Monday morning after a nice but emotionally difficult weekend in Boulder where we had to say goodbye to our friends and family. We expect to be back for a long visit soon after Thanksgiving, so it is not as though we are parting with any kind of finality, but the mere fact that we plan to base our lives from another side of the country makes us feel as though we are leaving the community, even though we will certainly return.

The first day’s driving was pleasant. 675 miles is a long way, but with it we cleared the eastern plains of Colorado, all of Nebraska, and made it to Des Moines, IA in time for dinner with our good friends Karen and Ben. Karen is a college professor at Iowa State, and a nursery school classmate of mine. She and Ben live in the coolest loft apartment I have ever seen in real life, and they had us stay over with them, which was totally awesome. Des Moines is having a flood right now, so when we walked across the river bridge we could see the submerged waterfront amphitheater, submerged waterfront bike trail, submerged lightposts, and quite a lot of submerged grass. It was an awesome treat to visit with Karen and Ben, but we had to press on early yesterday morning to continue the journey.

Continuing east, we crossed into Illinois and then Ohio.

Since Euonym was taking the day’s journey fairly well, we briefly considered pressing on through the night, but a short break for dinner outside Cleveland made us realize that we were too tired to make it, anyway. We pressed on to Erie, where we collapsed into an extremely convenient roadside hotel, of which I will shortly become the foursquare mayor.

In other news, after much back and forth with the boat yard, we seem to be about 75 percent likely to meet our target launch date of tomorrow morning. Here’s hoping!