The major thing wrong with having time off if you are still or once again on the work force is that when you come back after a nice relaxing time off, all the work that came in for you while you were away is sitting on your desk waiting for you. The rest that you got is out the window in the first five minutes! Last week for me was as near as possible a holiday as I had for days off for the Easter Weekend and only two days at work followed by two days for doctors’ appointments and then we were back into another weekend. In other words I had eight days off with a “weekend” of work in the middle of it, but now all the stuff that I would have been doing otherwise is on my desk or desktop waiting for my attention.

Sigh!

Oh well. I do owe it to the Town as they are paying me for this. I had gotten quite used to being able to set my own schedule and dance to my own tune. It’s a bit challenging to not have that freedom anymore.

Barb and I are both making plans for, not this summer, but next summer, after her second knee is done and we can get off in Nelleke again and start south. We are planning a much earlier departure than we ever made before, sometime in late August, so that we can take advantage of the weather and cruise the eastern end of Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake a bit and some reasonable probability of good weather to be able to make some offshore passages across the Gulf of Maine and from Woods Hole to Norfolk and perhaps even from Beauford NC around Cape Fear to St Mary’s Inlet and Fernandina Beach and Cumberland Island. That’ll give us some time for extended visits to some of the spots that we particularly wish to spend some time in. Add to that the pleasure of having Barb with two functioning knees that will allow her to participate in the sailing and shore activities pain free and it should be a much different sort of cruise that we had in the past. Maybe we’ll even get to smell the roses!

Let’s see now....... Long Island Sound......... Onset Mass, Newport RI, Woods Hole......those should keep us occupied for awhile. Then there’s the Chesapeake....I think that I’d like to cruise the eastern shore of that bay. We’ve never been over there. I am given to understand that it is much less developed. I think that we’d also like to cruise up to Washington DC. Apparently there is a YC with a transient mooring field or an anchorage which is right across from all the sightseeing spots that we would want to visit and who are used to visitors paying a dingy dock fee. Then a bust through the ICW to Beauford NC which we have never visited. In the past we have either stayed at Moorehead City or gone straight on through and stopped further along the ICW. This trip I think that we will anchor along the dunes off Beaufort and wait for the weather window to head on south.

Dream....Plan......Dream.....