Another 3 months has flown by and we are busy preparing to return east. Many house projects have occupied us, including rebuilding our storage shed and completely rebuilding the deck. The plastic lumber will live far longer than we will.
We enjoyed a visit by Gordon and Mary Matlock, friends from Longview, a few weeks ago, and will plan one more visit to Santa Cruz. Juliette is becoming quite the little lady, and Tyler is in first grade, reading more and thriving in a private school. I've put a few more pictures in the gallery.
We will leave Santa Barbara on 4/23 and plan to put Eos back in the water 4/25. After a long list of boat jobs we will button up the boat in the marina at Bodkin Creek and fly to England for our first ever visit. Our plans include visiting the countryside by car for the first 11 days, then joining a Rick Steves tour of London for a week. Our return to Baltimore is on 5/26, after which provisioning and other preparations will keep us busy.
If all goes well, we hope to exit the Chesapeake by Memorial Day, transit the Erie Canal and arrive in Lake Ontario by late June. After visiting the Thousand Islands area, our transit of the Trent-Severn Waterway should happen in early July, with the following few weeks spent in Georgian Bay and the North Channel.
After reading over volumes of material we have decided that the rivers and waterways from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico are just not that appealing to us. The mid Atlantic and New England coast have much more to offer than does cruising through the south, and the prospect of eventually having to be in Florida again was particularly noxious. So once we are in Sault Ste Marie in mid August, the plan is to turn south down Lake Huron, travel the full length of Lake Erie and the Erie Canal back to the Hudson. We will cruise New England and the mid Atlantic until later in the fall, then put the boat away and return to Santa Barbara. Hopefully there is no repeat of a Hurricane Sandy event this year, although being indoors at Bodkin Creek was no problem in 2012.
I will post again to the blog when Eos is back in the water.