Great Lakes Sailing

7/26/08

Bayfield, WI

Today was our 22nd anniversary and while we always want our anniversary celebrations to be memorable, this one will be salient for awhile. Life on a boat means that you are often subject to the weather, time and circumstance. Today needed to be a workday so we started out by downloading email at Burt and Francies, Bayfield's equivalent of Starbucks and then went to the bank and the hardware store. At 0900, the post office opened and we picked up our general delivery package that our dear friends back home had forwarded to us. After returning to the boat, we sorted the mail and paid bills. All of those things were needed and necessary but I really knew that I married the right woman when Deanna donned rubber gloves to help me change the oil in the engine. As anyone knows who has ever changed oil in a marine diesel knows, this is a messy job at best and about the only thing rubber gloves do is to contain the oil that runs down from your elbows.

Deanna's parents picked up the boys from summer camp and arrived around 1530. The boys needed a complete disinfecting as they smelled like a combination of fire, mud and body odor. Unfortunately, there isn't any laundry facility in Bayfield so laundry would have to wait until tomorrow when we travel to the Madeline Island village of La Pointe.