Sunday, August 30, 2009

Oulalala !!! Indeed....lunch with Paula

My friend Paula Cortner was visiting some of her MS colleagues in Virginia Beach so I decided to drive down and join her for lunch on the beach. It was a great lunch and we had so much fun aftwards doing some turbo shopping. Paula and her husband Mark are charter members of The Greater Tulsa Area Semi-Gourmet Serious Fun Dinner Club formed oh so many years ago. Its still together and I sure miss the group.

I drove on to Port Royal where Barry and I met up and spent the weekend with our friends and dropped off our car so it will be there for us when we return in a few weeks. Then we will go to Ft. Knox for Family Day with Casey! We are looking forward to the trip back south on the ICW and then head west for a week or so....


Thursday, August 27, 2009

People are so nice...

People are so cool. Especially older ones. Some boaters came in earlier this afternoon just for a short stop. They remembered Murphys Drug store and wanted to go get something to drink.....its an old fashioned drug store anyway I mentioned they have great rootbeer floats. They had to walk there....a short walk up to town. Well don't you know they came back with RB floats for myself, Barry and Lewis todays dock master. I know it was the older guy.......he reminded me of my sweet Dad......he would do something like that too! Made my day.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Jean Leaves us sad......


Barry and Jean after docking Po Chang




Jean below throwing off the lines.......



Barry (at the bow)was first mate on the short trip up Urbanna Creek for Po Chang's haul out.

















Monday we helped our friend Jean move his boat Po Chang up the creek so it could be demasted and then hauled out in preparation for it being shipped first to the west coast then on to Malaysia some where......to be determined. We meet good folks along our way and sometimes make great friends we know we will stay friends with forever. Jean is one of them. We will miss him sorely. Barry has been going around speaking with a French accent and in the little bit of the language he actually knows....and saying Ooo Lala. The cat loves it and of course I laugh and think we are going to be doing this french accent thing for a long time to come. I hope we left Jean with some good Sami colloquialisms. Like 'chicken one day and feathers the next' (thanks Penny).







Wednesday, August 19, 2009

DC and the Smithsonian......sort of


First of all, I have to say I have been looking forward to this forever.
It would have been great but it was not. It was a 2.5 hour drive to get there. No big deal.....but once we got there (and we drove right to it) it took over another hour to find a place to park. NO spaces, lots full and at one point we ended up at Regan National Airport asking how to get out of Regan National Airport. We saw others making really dangerous U-turns because evidently THEY were also lost.....but I digress. Eventually we did find a parking space with a meter. A 2 hour meter. Well we could come back out and feed it again....ooops guess what? NO change. We got together about a dollar but that only got us 15 minutes. No kidding. So I did the fast walk into one of the closest museums only a block away, got searched, had to walk down several flights of stairs, the thru what turned out to be the coolest part of the trip.....moving sidewalks thru a tube like tunnel with little white lights......that led to the food area where a very nice woman gave me what I thought would be enough to get us the 2 hour limit. I fast walked all the way back to the car, fed another $3 into the meter and got a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes. Its by this time raining.....grab the umbrella...... F...It. Lets go.....we walked about another 4 blocks to the right museum.......and I learned a few things. First of all I learned I still dislike rubbing elbows with the unwashed masses. I love people. You know I do......but loud mouth, stroller pushing rude parents of misbehaved snot nosed rude children I do not enjoy. People were sneezing and coughing right and left and if I did get close to one of the exhibits I was excited to see, there was so much filth on the glass I could scarcely see. I saw the Hope Diamond for about 3 seconds and even it looked dirty......I did see some 20carat natural yellow diamonds I did like.....earrings. Beautiful but I had to push a kid out of the way to see them.........then put my elbows out to block his siblings. For some reason their mother thought it necessary to talk at the top of her lungs about inane things but showed absolutely no stress about her three snotty nose miners.
I could not wait to get the hell out of there. Who knew I was such a snob? My friend Penny had a friend who used to tie her kids arms to the high chair when she fed them so they would stay cleaner. I used to thing that was pretty severe but now I think how many fewer boogers would end up on places YOU have to touch if we did this more often especially in public places. I think we should consider this as a new law.
The good news is we found an Uno Chicago Grill and had some great pizza tho our waitress was Bi=Polar (she told us this upfront) and would not stop talking to us....tho she did say she thought I looked 40 so she must have something going for her!






When we went to Jamestown, one of the skeletons was out to loan to....you guessed it The Smithsonian so we got to see it......and you know they are right...you see one really skinny guy....you have seen them all.
So Barry took this shot of the Capitol Dome from his rear view mirror. I did like driving around seeing the sites from my airconditioned car. It was 90 degrees. You cant get close enough to the White House to see it from a car.....THANKS terriorists.
Anyway we ran into some really serious weather on the way home....some trees down and scary straight winds.....and really interesting clouds.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Middleburg

We had lunch at The Red Horse.......was ok. Meant to go to The Red Fox but ended up here. The trip was great. We loved seeing our friends Liz and Chuck again. We met some of their friends who sail andor hunt so there was lots to talk about indeed.

We had a great time and I threw a leg over a nice quiet QH mare who needed to shake out the cobwebs as well. The weather stayed decent for us on Saturday. I was also able to connect with some hounds tho it was way too hot to take hounds out even for roading. Liz and Chuck have two German Sheppards....Anna and uh oh....forgot the big boys name.....geeeesh Im getting old.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Gypsy loves Barry


Gypsy is THE best cat ever. She is calm and cool and clean and very loving. She comes when she is called and loves to be with us. She is 13 this summer and came to The Carolina's with me from Tulsa....my foxhunting buddy Mac Braly had the momma cat and litter. She climbed up onto his shoulder from the companionway steps last night and came to bed with him.......I called her name and she looked over and I took this shot.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Buy Boats...more of the same

Here are some more shots and some shakey (sorry) video below, of one of the bigger boats coming in.....very close to our boat and in the beginning Jean's boat. He is actually in his kayak at the bow of his boat watching but at one point surrenders by putting his hands in the air.........you have to look closely but he does.....sorry the video is not more clear.



me in the dingy with our boat at anchor in the background.


Sunday, August 2, 2009

more later but here is what a buy boat looks like











Our boat with the 1st Buy Boat that arrived on Thursday in the slip next to us....we had to leave to accomodate one of the other 18.