19 May 2014

Day three in Ilion, but that’s been fine.

On Friday night Tom C stopped with packages that we had sent to his house. My sister had remarked that the UPS guy was bummed since the packages had stopped with robot build season being over, but he seemed pretty chipper with the latest influx of goodies.

We got through the night, high water came with 9″ to spare on the wall we are tied up to. There was flooding to the east and west of us, but the Canal Authority was able to keep the water levels down. But for the last three days the Canal has been moving pretty fast, from some simple time measurements about 2-3 knots. But there has been a ton of large debris that floated by.

Saturday it started to clear off. It was cold and windy in the morning but that didn’t stop over 80 bikers to come for the annual Blessing of the Bikes. You can see some of them in the picture above. Lots of clubs were represented along with a few unaffiliated bikers.

Both Susan and I did loads of laundry and I chatted with the crew of a boat headed for the Rochester area. We talked about the different marinas to go to when we get closer.

At the Illion Marina is a hot dog place, Voss’. It started off over 100 years ago Utica and it’s the third year here in Ilion at a branch store. In the last few days we’ve been working our way through the menu. So far big winners have been the hot dogs (duh), hot sausage with peppers and onions, and the crinkle cut fries.

They make their own ice cream and Susan has had a “Cola Float” and we both had sundaes. They have 6 kinds of ice cream and every topping you can think of. The shakes are amazing, you can get thin (slurpable via a straw) or thick (serious cheek effort required.) It’s all very inexpensive, our average meal is about $9, we can’t do commercial fast food for that. Which reminds me, we’ve not been to fast food since we left home. Yay US!

We’ve been into town, there is the most wonderful True-Value Hardware, reminds me of the old Dover Hardware “if we don’t have it, you don’t need it”. We also food shopped at the Dollar General (which was also huge and well stocked) for the few items we needed. No fresh veggies, so we stopped at Aldi’s and Susan stocked up.

Sunday was BLOG DAY!!!! You may have noticed an influx of pictures in the galleries (yay Susan!). The thumbnails and slide shows now have captions (some programming on my part). I got all the back postings done on my part and Susan is doing the last time lapse. So you will need to scroll down to see the latest posts. We post in “Order that it happened”, so there is a little Time Warp going on. Try to deal with it. Next time we Loop we will bring a full time blogger aboard. (not)

It’s also was FEND OFF THE LOGS DAY! Since we are in a little basin, the current eddies around the boat. Sometimes that eddy brings BIG HONKING LOGS with it. So we push them off into the canal with the hope that the main current will drag it downstream.

Monday has been clean the boat day, Susan did the insides and I did some re-varnishing of some of the woodwork. Belle has been displaying her considerable nap skills, not all concerned with the activity around her.

I also went into town to get a haircut. I had decided when I left work in March to grow my hair and beard out. I had a running start since my last haircut was for Christmas. So I was well on my way when we set sail. Yesterday we tried to “facetime” with the grand-baby and the camera was showing, what in the nicest terms could be only described as “psycho Santa”. Ummm not good. So I’m back to my normal length and when we did talk to the baby she wasn’t all freaked out.

The canal may open on Tuesday. The other two boats are in a hurry to go. I’m concerned about the still rushing current and the stuff in the water. I won’t be happy to abort the trip with bent propellers. So once the water flow slows and the river gets more blue / green then we will take off.

Until then we still have steak sandwiches, chicken and tuna melts to try at Voss’.