Wednesday, July 19 - 26, 2006

Flew out of Marsh Harbour to Miami, Fla., rented a car and drove to Marathon. What a fast and crazy place Miami is when you’ve been out of touch with the USA pace of life for 4 months. While in Marathon we stayed with friends aboard, Wind Spirit, Dave & Brenda. We had a great time with them as well as a lot of very late nights. We even had time to go out to the flats by boat to wade and relax.

Brenda, Bab & Dave relaxing at the flats.

Marianne and Jorge had a cookout for us which enabled us to visit with friends we might have run out of time to visit. Great ribs, fish and all the trimmings!

On Sunday, it was off to Sarasota to visit Diane and family as well as get the truck settled into it’s new home. The drive was longer than expected, but we did see about 25 alligators sunbathing as we crossed Alligator Alley (Interstate 75). Diane showed us all around the Sarasota/Bradenton area. We have decided that we like the west coast of Florida much better than the east coast.

We celebrated Tom’s birthday by opening his present, with the help of Diane‘s grandkids, Casey and Haley, a Sageman Djembe drum. The large drum ordered was bigger than expected so we ended up returning it and keeping the smaller one in Diane’s arms.

Diane’s son, Tom took us to Sand Dollar Island in his boat on Monday afternoon. Had a lot of fun - shell finding, sand dollar picking and beach bocce.

Wednesday, July 26 was the day for driving back to Miami to catch our flight back home to the Abacos. Flight was on time, caught the Albury ferry back to Man-o-War Cay, picked up the dinghy and back to Escape in time for cocktails.

Thursday, July 27 - Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Off to Marsh Harbour for reprovisioning. Once provisioned, were forced back to our mooring in Man-o-War for a wait & see on the track of Tropical Strom Chris!! Everyone is carefully watching and preparing as well as giving the sky an evil eye to ward off TS Chris.

Thursday, August 3, 2006

Barometer Bob from the Abacos Cruisers Net was elated to report a new weakened and more western path of TS Chris but Chris Parker of the Caribbean Weather Net still holds some reservations… we’ll see. The evil eyes are now into overtime bringing in the air heads and thunder balls as backup. All of these things are Bahamian idols believed to ward off bad weather and provide protection.

Saturday, August 5, 2006

Good news!! Chris is now a tropical depression now making landfall in Cuba. Hooray!!