Part One of our travels to Port Clinton, Ohio
A month of working to get the boat ready for our loop and our trip into Canada.
You probably feel the way that I do: I can’t believe it is almost exactly one month since we hibernated the house for our trip to Ohio. The time has flown by as we have been working to get the boat ready to start out for Canada and the beginning of our loop.
Let me catch you up as to where the saga of our Great Loop journey left off last year. Some of you might be unaware that we were to start our loop last year in 2021. As the fates and the angels laughed at our attempts to leave the marina on our 6000 mile journey, one after another obstacle was set in our path. Each time it was back to the marina to await repairs to try to start out again. The coup de grace was the seizing up of our port engine’s transmission that put us on the sidelines for the rest of 2021. In September of 2021 we left the boat at the marina to have the diesel mechanics replace the transmission and then the boat would go into winter storage. Licking our wounds as we headed back home we consoled ourselves that we would have a second chance of heading out onto our grand adventure in 2022.
2022 arrived and we plan what other projects needed to be done on our boat before we would venture out onto Lake Erie and proceed to point the bow of the boat north to Canada. May arrived and it was time to head for Ohio. Our plan was to get the boat projects out of the way and then go out onto Lake Erie a few times to build up our maneuvering skills. When that was accomplished, around the end of June, we would head up into Canada.
Oh, silly children, we forgot that the name of the game is hurry up and wait when it comes to boat work.
Departure day (Saturday, May 21st) was arriving quickly as we packed up the truck with all the things we thought we needed for boat life. The last thing we grabbed was a reluctant Miss Kitty and off we went heading for Port Clinton, Ohio. This is a two day journey across four states to reach Ohio. The only glitch we had was that we had not made a hotel reservation because we did not know how far we would get that first day. I had good luck on our last trip finding a reasonably priced pet friendly hotel, not so on this trip. I called easily 10 hotels/motels being told that they no longer accept pets or that they were full up for the night. While I was calling another hotel Michael spied a billboard that was advertising a small locally owned motel. Lucky for us they accepted pets and were reasonably priced. Beat sleeping in the truck!
In Port Clinton we had made arrangements to stay at a pet friendly motel that is just across the street from the marina. It too is a locally run operation and the staff there are friendly and helpful. We would stay for five nights as we worked on polishing and waxing the boat. The boat would launch on Thursday May 26th at 9:00 AM and we would move aboard on Friday the 27th.
You might know that animals are hard to predict. Our Miss Kitty usually does not like strangers and will hide when they come into the house. All bets are off when it came to the boat. She would greet any new person who came on the boat and expected them to pet her. That was 2021, what would 2022 bring? The first surprise was getting Miss Kitty out of the truck and into the Port Clinton motel room. Usually I would have to grab her, wrestle her into her carrier, and then transport her into the motel as she protested (probably calling me all kinds of bad kitty names). Then she would find a hiding place while she plotted her escape out the motel door. Lucky for us the escape never occurred. As we started the unpacking process Miss Kitty was content to stay in the truck as we proceeded to pull everything out of the truck until there was only her left in the truck! She seemed to say “No, thank you. I will just stay here in the back seat.” This was not an option, so, I grabbed her up while she dug her nails into the seat, then the head rest as I tried to extract her from the vehicle. When we made it into the motel room she looked around and I believe she recognized it from the year before. As luck would have it it was the exact same room. She settled in immediately without too much fan fare. Cats! Go figure.
After getting to the motel it was time to relax and celebrate at the Overboard restaurant and bar. Part two is coming later.
To be continued…