Just like downtown

We are safely tied up at the Fort Lauderdale Downtown City Docks (map).  The docks line both sides of the river for several blocks and across three bascule bridges; I requested a spot east of the first bridge so we would not have to contend with any openings.  We're on the north bank, a short walk from the shops and restaurants of Las Olas street.  I spun the boat around for a port-side tie and we put a scooter on the ground shortly after arriving.  Louise has already posted a few photos of our new digs.

En route from the anchorage yesterday we first stopped at our old friend, the Las Olas Marina, to use their pumpout.  All the T-heads were taken so I had to actually maneuver back into an inside slip first, but we went bow-in so it was fairly straightforward.  As a city facility, the pumpout is actually available free of charge to the public, but they don't have an easy-access dock for it.  The pumpouts here at the Downtown Docks are on the south bank, and there was not enough depth for us there when we arrived at low tide.

This is a great spot, with easy access to downtown, a Publix grocery store, and several transit options.  The price is right, too (for Fort Lauderdale, anyway), at about $1.40 a foot after discounts, including power, for a boat our size.  Next time we come through we might spend a few nights here and take in some of the local flavor.

On this visit our real objective was to get fuel and water, charge our batteries, and get me to Palm Beach for my eye doctor appointment today.  As I type, I am sitting on the Tri-Rail train heading north, after a free shuttle ride from downtown, just a block from our slip.  Louise will be joining me in Palm Beach on a later train, and Martin and Steph are driving down from Stuart to meet us for dinner.

We took two nights at the dock, and tomorrow morning we will move the boat a few hundred feet downriver to the designated fueling area on the south bank.  The fuel truck will meet us there to supply us with 300 gallons of diesel.  The price when I spoke to them yesterday was $3.45 per gallon, plus 6% sales tax -- the best I found anywhere from Fort Lauderdale to Miami.  We still have about 500 gallons aboard, but finding a place to get a truck to the boat is challenging so we're fueling now while we have the opportunity.

Last night we walked across the river to the Downtowner Saloon and ate outside, right on the water.  It's a real casual joint popular with the locals, a far cry from the uber-trendy places along Las Olas.  We both had burgers almost too large to finish.  We walked along the south bank for a ways on our way back -- lots of 90-130' yachts tied up along that stretch.

This morning we took advantage of having wheels to pick up a new BCD for Louise along with some dive weights, and once we get the regulator I just bought serviced, we'll have everything we need to go diving except the tanks.  We'll try to get in an instructional refresher dive in the next few weeks, so we will be ready to dive with our friends when they get underway (they have extra tanks and a compressor to fill them).  Louise is doing the grocery shopping now while the scooter is still on the ground.

After we fuel up tomorrow we will head south from Fort Lauderdale along the ICW.  I'm not sure how far we will get, which will depend in part on how long fueling takes.  We will most likely be anchored at one of the handful of spots on the way to Miami.

Empire built

We are back home, currently still parked at Infinity Coach, after our whirlwind trip to New York. We were so busy while we were there that I never got a chance to blog, although I managed to tweet exactly once, from our layover in Chicago on our way home. We've also been going full-tilt since we returned Thursday, and this morning it was blissful to sleep in. Now that I am caught up, I finally have the time for a post.

We had a great trip. Sound Transit got us to the airport in plenty of time for a late lunch before boarding our flight. My handheld amateur radio earned me extra scrutiny at the TSA, but all made it through eventually, including both the radio and my cheap corkscrew that I keep for just such occasions. We had a celebratory beer at lunch in honor of our ninth anniversary, and in anticipation of no further imbibing to be done once we boarded. My usual seat-booking trick netted us an empty seat between us, making the five-hour flight a tad more tolerable, and we arrived on time into Newark and were in quarters at the Hampton Inn there by midnight.

I have gobs of Hilton points, even though I haven't paid for a room there in over a decade, because two out of my three credit cards rack them up. A "free" room in Newark was available at Hampton, Hilton, and Doubletree, but Hampton includes breakfast and WiFi. We dragged our sorry behinds out of bed just in time to catch the last of the hot breakfast, and shortly afterwards my folks arrived from mid-state to pick us up. We had a nice drive north, and four hours in the car together to catch up since our last visit, during the Hurricane Irene NJ relief operation for the Red Cross.

After getting settled in at the hotel in Queensbury, where we met up with my aunt and uncle, we all headed over to a nice restaurant in downtown Glens Falls to meet up with my cousin, his wife, and their son, whose First Communion we were here to celebrate. The cover story was a pre-communion family dinner, but in actuality it was a surprise 80th-birthday party for my mother, whose actual birthday was just a few days away. She really was surprised, too, and one of our clandestine roles had been to ensure they picked us up in Newark in plenty of time to make dinner.

Our "nephew" (really first cousin once removed) had his First Communion at mass Sunday morning, along with four other First Communicants. It was a nice service, followed by brunch at a nearby restaurant with family and friends from both sides. It is a rite of passage for young Catholics, and I passed on to him the talismans that I myself received on the same occasion over four decades ago. A steak dinner at their house rounded out the day.

We had a great visit and enjoyed catching up with my family over the course of the weekend. Monday morning my aunt, uncle, and folks left for points south, and my cousins later dropped us off at the train station in Albany in enough time for all of us to have one final dinner at Rudy's, just across the tracks, which we can highly recommend.

Most of the trip from Albany to Chicago is overnight, but we did enjoy a bit of scenery at both ends. After checking in at the Metropolitan Lounge at Union Station, where we were able to securely store our bags, we had plenty of time to walk over to the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) for lunch. We have an affiliate club there on the 67th floor, with stunning views in all directions. We reminisced briefly about our dinner there, just about a month before we started blogging our odyssey here -- we actually drove Odyssey into The Loop and parked on the street overnight right outside the Sears Tower, possible only because we were there on the weekend.

Union Station in Chicago is a bit of history in itself, and Amtrak's first-class Metropolitan Lounge makes waiting there between trains pleasant. In addition to the baggage check, the lounge provides free WiFi, soft drinks, coffee, and muffins, as well as early access to the boarding platform ahead of coach class. As we passed the coach-class platform entrance, we noted for the first time a phalanx of TSA employees and scanners, and it appeared that the coach passengers were being inspected before boarding. Apparently, terrorists do not travel by first class sleeper accommodations, which would lend new meaning to the term "sleeper cell."

The Empire Builder between Chicago and Seattle is the real reason we wanted to return by train, one of the few great US train trips which we had never done. We were not disappointed; despite bringing three magazines and my laptop, we never stopped looking out the windows during the daylight hours, and our attendant put the beds down shortly after we returned from the dining car each night. We traveled a portion of this route in Odyssey two years ago (waving to the passing Empire Builder in several spots), and we enjoyed seeing some of the same landmarks from a different perspective.

We noted several places we had stopped overnight as we passed through small towns and station stops. As we passed through Glacier National Park, and later the Cascade Range, I was actually able to stare at all the passing scenery, something I generally can not do as I am focused on the road when we are driving. The meals in the dining car were acceptable if not gourmet fare, and we met several interesting folks at meal times. In all, a very worthwhile excursion.

The King Street station in Seattle is partly under construction, and we had a bit of a challenge finding our way to the bus stop for the ride to Sumner. There is actually a train that would bring us here, but it only runs southbound in the late afternoon, and we were in Seattle by 10am. We will, instead, take that train north back into Seattle Monday morning to meet up with our broker to view some boats; he arrives in town Sunday evening.

When we left Infinity last Friday, I left them with a to-do list that would have kept them busy the whole time we were gone, and then some. However their backlog of other work plus the loss of an employee in the interim meant they did not even get started until the afternoon we returned. You may recall that I had removed the toilet just before we left, in order to facilitate repairing the floor in the bathroom, and, not wanting to do that nasty job twice, we lit a fire under them to expedite the floor project that same afternoon.

Louise ran off to the flooring store to pick up some new vinyl; a 3'-wide strip of roll goods cost us all of $20. Meanwhile, the rotted subfloor was removed, a consequence of the same window leak, now repaired, that cost us the replacement of half the wall in that same room back in Las Vegas. Without hookups and easy access to a clean restroom there, we did not want to remove the toilet at that shop, thus could not replace the floor at the same time as the wall.

Infinity had new subflooring in and some leveling compound applied in just enough time to be able to glue down the new flooring at the very end of the shift. Louise and I were able to wrestle the toilet back into place and I had it all reconnected in enough time to avoid any clandestine excursions to the nearby bushes after hours. And after five full days of eating out two or three meals per day, we had a light snack for dinner before crashing completely.

Yesterday was another full day at the shop, starting with pulling into the lube bay at 8:30 for a lube, oil, and filter change. Disappointingly, while the bus was up on the lifts we discovered that oil is leaking from the air dryer, confirming my suspicions. The dryer itself has no oil supply, so this can only mean that oil is leaking at the air compressor. We've never had this problem before, yet as a precaution we replaced the compressor with a remanufactured unit when we had the engine out, at Choo-Choo Garage back in July. I have to guess now that the replacement unit has a problem; too bad, because getting it out now that the engine is in the bus is a major project.

The rest of the day was taken up by finishing up the work in the bathroom, to include caulking the new floor and replacing the trim, and recaulking the shower, as well as replacing the upper front windshield trim that had been damaged by the leaks there, repaired last month in Alameda. We also pulled off the butch 'roo bars on the front of the coach, now chipped and rusted where the powder coat has been damaged by eight years of road wear, and sent it off to be media-blasted and re-coated with more durable bed-liner material. Unfortunately, the employee who left the shop was the woodworking specialist, so the various cabinetry touch-ups we had requested are probably not in the cards.

You may detect a theme in all this, which is that we are now dealing with mostly cosmetic issues. For example, we are finally sending the cat-damaged love seat out for re-upholstery here, in addition to all the other work. We are working on getting Odyssey listed for sale, in anticipation of a move onto a boat, and these sorts of cosmetic problems can be show-stoppers when trying to close a deal. Long-time readers know that, when it comes to the seldom-seen underlying systems, we've always been on top of maintenance and repairs, whereas cosmetic-only issues have been a lower priority for us. Not so with many sellers, likely because surface appearance is so visceral with most buyers.

Tomorrow's project for us is to empty the area under the loveseat and get it unbolted so the upholsterer can take it Monday morning, and get the rest of the coach ready for a day of work in our absence. We need to get on the last Sounder at 8:15am, before the shop opens, to meet our broker in Seattle Monday morning, and we'll be back long after the shop closes. On their slate for Monday is to adjust both awnings, pull out the loveseat, and try to get Truck-Lite and their retailer to honor the warranty on our expensive LED taillights, which are still legal but look unappealing due to a handful of LEDs out on each one.

We need to be in Anacortes by Tuesday evening to look at some more boats and be in place for Trawler Fest, so we will try to wrap everything up here by mid-day Tuesday. With any luck, enough of the list will be ticked off by then that we will not have to swing back here after the show, but we are leaving that possibility open if need be.

Making sausage

We are parked at the Casino Queen RV Park, adjacent to the casino of the same name which floats regally in the Mississippi River in East Saint Louis, Illinois (map). Our FMCA rate of $24.25 per night gets us full hookups with 50-amp power, meaning we can run all our air conditioners at once, a welcome relief in the 95+ heat and humidity here. The spaces on this side of the park are pretty close together, though -- not that it matters to us, since we are gone all day. For $5 more on the south side of the park we would get a bit more room, both side-to-side and front-to-back, as well as grass between the sites (we have gravel).

A phone next to the mini-mart, which also serves as RV park office, rings down to the security desk, and they will send a van any time of day or night to pick us up and take us to the MetroLink light rail station. (The return trip necessitates a short walk from the station to the casino entrance, where a van can again be summoned to take us back to the RV park.) The mini-mart, by the way, is especially well stocked, with a wide selection of beer, wine and spirits, frozen dinners and breakfast entrees, snacks, soft drinks, a small selection of food items, and the usual RV supplies.

We've been using booklets of ten two-hour transit passes, making each pass $1.75. Generally we only ride one-way on each pass, but I've been doing a round-trip back home mid-day on the longer days to walk the dog, and I can ride round trip on one pass. Our total transit outlay for the week will be less than $40 -- not bad in a city where that is also the going rate on dinner for one in a downtown bistro. The convention center is just two stops away -- less than two minutes -- across the historic Eads bridge, where the trolley runs on the old L&M train tracks on the lower level, below the roadway. You can look out the train window and straight down to the river below.

We've both been pretty busy at General Assembly since we are both delegates this year, meaning we have to attend all the plenary sessions and vote on the business issues of the association. (We also have to write a report on our experience, which we are doing by keeping another blog.) That's left little time here at home, including time to post here. We did have some time Wednesday and Thursday mornings (we pulled in here Tuesday evening), and I used most of that time to bondo, sand, bondo, sand, prime, sand, prime, seal, and paint the giant divot we got when a rock or some such hit us en route here on Monday. I got as far as a second coat of paint just in time -- Wednesday afternoon the heavens opened and dumped a few inches of rain on us.

Now that the paint has cured more than 48 hours, I can move on to the next step, which is to blend and smooth the area with rubbing compound, after which I can start applying clear-coat. It doesn't look like I will get much of a break in the program to do that, but I'm going to try to find time tomorrow, so we can leave Monday as scheduled. If I wait until Monday to spray the clear, it won't be dry enough to drive off. If I don't clear before we leave, the repaired area will be exposed to dirt and bugs as we drive, and I'll have to sand it again before applying the clear. I suppose that if we have to drive off with it unfinished, I can cover the whole area with some plastic sheeting held on with painter's tape.

I expect that the very full schedule of GA and the additional pressure of the remaining paint touch-up will mean that I will not post here again until either just before we leave on Monday, or at our next stop. I haven't a clue yet where that might be.

Remembering the Alamo

We are in San Antonio, at the KOA campground (map), where we have spent the last four nights.  KOA is an uncharacteristic stop for us, but this time it was a good fit.  Boondocking in, for example, a Wal-Mart parking lot is not a good option for a four-day stay in any case, and, with temperatures in the 90's all week, we'd have to run the generator nearly full-time, since the A/C's need to be on all day long for the pets.  Our usual fall-back options, such as Elks lodges and fairgrounds, are not available here.  There are four well-rated campgrounds in San Antonio, and we chose among them based on city transit maps and schedules -- there is a bus stop right at the KOA's gate, and a bus runs directly downtown from there on a frequent schedule.  We lucked out and got an end-of-row spot with little traffic and few neighbors, yet close to the pool and the bus stop.

We have had a pleasant stay here, being quintessential tourists.  We took a half-hour cruise around the downtown section of the San Antonio river (check out Louise's video montage of this), spent some time walking the famed River Walk, sampled three of the restaurants along same, did a one-hour motorcoach tour of the city (sort of a busman's holiday), and had a nice dinner at our affiliate club here in town.  We went to the zoo, an outing that required two city buses each way, and we even saw the movie RV in a downtown theater while we were cruising the River Center Mall attached to the River Walk (don't bother, unless you are an RV'er, in which case some of the RV antics will strike a chord).  Of course, we also spent some time visiting the Alamo, an experience I found to be quite emotional.

There is more to see and do here, but we will save it for another visit in somewhat cooler weather.  We are getting some chores done this morning, and we will  leave around mid-day and head to New Braunfels, where we plan to spend the afternoon at the Schlitterbahn water park there.