BACK IN THE SADDLE

Manteo, NC -- We're feeling a bit wistful on returning to an empty beach. Our kids, Casey and Dylan (and Brett!), left for college while we were in New Mexico. We had hoped to be here to send them off. Instead, once we get things situated here, we'll be heading west again, this time to Asheville and Boone.

In the meantime, we're hard at the last-minute preparations for our watery departure, the one that has now been delayed by at least three weeks.

The big items on our short TO DO list:

--Order the Tufted Topper for our bed
--Get solar panels and install them
--Buy and install electronic navigation equipment
--Fix the water filter
--Sort out my folding bike

For that first item, we had to cut a pattern in the shape of our mattress. That sounds easy, right? Few things associated with boats are easy. Since there's no space big enough to lay the mattress out on the boat, we had to get it off the boat and onto the dock. Fortunately we were able to manage this without dunking either the mattress or ourselves, although not without making ourselves look silly. The pattern is now wending its way to get us a poofy pad to soften our sleep. So long aching shoulder!

Our work was done in time to avoid this: