Sometimes our world changes so fast!
We left India when Wuhan was a whisper, we left Sallisaw as the coronavirus was an interesting topic and we returned to Covid-19.
Oklahoma welcomed us back to a beautiful spring. The dogs were let out of the house, the cats started collecting and distributing dead-gifts and the mercury skyrocketed.
I (James, with Bonny, below) cleaned the shop, organized the tools and trimmed the cedar in front of the house.
…then Dena and I went shopping for a power washer. We found a good one at one place, found a better one at a better deal at another place, tossed that sucker in the back, got home, and went to work on the front of Dena’s mom’s house.
We got to hang out with both sides of (Dena’s) fam and we got to earn our keep in both Sallisaw and Moses Lake. We both felt great about that.
The round trip from Oklahoma to Washington State and back was accomplished solely on Blue Highways. We eschewed interstate freeways altogether, and it gave us a humbling and fascinating view of the American West. Boy that sucker is huge!
On the way from Oklahoma to Maryland and thence to Rhode Island, we compromised. The long, long distances between small towns were not to be found, so the 55 to 45 to 35 to 45 to 55 routine got old pretty quick.
Not, however, before we drove through Beebe, Arkansas, one of my (Dena’s) childhood homes. I had some good times in that barn!
OK to AR to TN to VA…
We pushed our bodies to the rental-car limit to put this part of the adventure to bed…
…So, we went for a stroll in a Virginia forest to shake off the road. The mixed highway-freeway thing took us through the states that had not yet locked down their citizens, the better to access fuel, food, and rooms, but we found that folks were doing some version of what they saw their (wide-scale) neighbors doing on the news and via the internet.
Once we crossed the Potomac and entered Maryland, it was pretty clear that there would be no breakfast buffet at the motel, nor would we be using the pool. (Ha!)
We stopped in Annapolis to pick up our brand new main sail plus other important items and took another walk to get our heads on right.
I’m glad we started the day with some calm and friends (from 6′ away), because driving through NYC never gets easier, even in a pandemic, though Connecticut was smooth all the way through. The next hiccup happened in Rhode Island, where the National Guard was set up to stop all people with out-of-state license plates and take our information so that the state health department could…I don’t know what. We were asked to self-quarantine for 14 days if we were staying in the state. That will be easier to accomplish when the boat’s in the water and we’re living tight and happy.
We came halfway around the world, across the U.S. and back again in a little under two months and I’m happy to say, we’re both (James and Dena) still healthy and (finally) happily back to our boat, S/V S.N. Cetacea!
