Cooling Our Heels In St. Louis (Literally!)

Ah, Florida! Sunny skies and warm days. Its a wonderful thing to behold in January and February.
Here are a few picks of our last few days there.

BTW, I have finally been able to completely update the photo album and map which can be accessed by the links above.

Lisa and our buddy Charlie Pendergrass at Regatta Pointe

Ross, Laura and ourselves at the wonderful dockside restaurant at Regatta Pointe

...and the view outside our front door as a large winter storm swept through the  middle part of the country.

This sucks. Today's forecast for Sarasota is for sunny skies and a high of eighty-one degrees. And here in St. Louis it is for something all together different, as the picture above snows...I mean "shows". And to make matters worse we have been following the blogs of our friends as they make their way to the Florida Keys or across the state on the Okeechobee. Argh! One little episode that was really disgusting was I was watching the Weather Channel the other evening when the storm system was beginning to take shape and start it's trek eastward out of the Rockies and the southwest states. The talking head said something along the lines of, "This is a very large system that stretches from Texas all the way up to the Canadian border dumping snow, sleet or rain all the way to the east coast...except for southern Florida where it will be sunny and warm." Thanks, dude.

At least I have deck shoes to wear. No deck, mind you, but I've got the shoes.

Our Last Days in Sarasota, Then Onto STL For Shoreleave

Shore Leave in St. Louis – Brrr

 Ross and Laura made it! And we had a few days to have fun with them before we had to leave for St. Louis for a two month shore leave. We had one grand day with them where we covered the town. After a few errands we headed on down to Marina Jack marina in beautiful downtown Sarasota. It was made even better by finding that Bill and Joy of Proud Lady were there. After visiting with them for awhile and a quick lunch at a very cool waterside restaurant we heading over to St. Armands and Longboat Quay to see how the 1% lives. Driving over the bridge to get there we could see that the water was spectacularly clear in Sarasota Bay. It was a fun day indeed.

 But it was time for us to leave.

Our trip to St. Louis took two days. We departed Palmetto on Super Bowl Sunday under bright, shiny blue skies. Ross and Laura of The Zone who were now docked next to us saw us off. It was still cool but the high temperature for the day was near 80 degrees. But that happy thought did us no good as we were heading north towards much colder conditions. Our first day’s drive took us out of Florida into Georgia passing Atlanta and ending up in the city of Dalton about an hours drive south of Chattanooga. We did reverse layer clothing tactics. By that I mean unlike in Florida where we would start with long pants and long sleeve shirts with some kind of fleece top garment stripping down to shorts and tee shirts as the day progressed we started with lighter clothing and added on as the temperature dropped the further north we went. The second day got progressively colder to where there was still some snow on the ground in St. Louis as we arrived.

A week has passed and we are both working on our own personal to-do lists. Mine is mostly boaty stuff, or at least those things that can be done here, mostly ordering things that we will need upon our return to the boat come the end of March.

Just for your information the reason for the delay in putting a new blog post up is that my trusty Toshiba laptop computer crapped out and was DOA when I took it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. It needs a new C drive. Of course I had to order a new system recovery disk from Toshiba before the Geeks switch out the drive. Bummer.

We have been getting tidbits of info about our friends still down in Florida. Unfortunately not all the news has been good. The crew of Limelight, Don and Anita, have had a very unfortunate thing happen to them. They were riding their bicycles when Anita was hit by a car. Laura sent a text to us about it. She was injured to the extent that she needed to have surgery performed on one of her knees. That is all we know. Here’s hoping that the damage is slight and that her recovery is speedy. IF ANYONE ELSE KNOWS MORE ABOUT THIS SITUATION PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO DARRELL.GROB@GMAIL.COM.

And so here we are dressing warmly and hoping for the time to pass quickly and our tasks will fall into place easily.