Sue at the U of VA quad. Stanford must have copied this idea for their quad.

A few days before leaving Richmond I called and got a 2 PM “behind the scenes” tour that includes the normal downstairs rooms but also goes to the 2nd and 3rd floors of Jefferson’s house. Monticello is only an hour from Richmond, so we got there in the morning on Monday April 27 and first visited the University of Virginia that Jefferson designed. After that we had lunch in the Miche tavern. We had a great guide for Jefferson’s house and learned and saw a lot.

Sue on Jefferson’s back porch.

Around 4:30 we left for Washington, DC. The GPS took us on back roads that went past a number of really beautiful horse farms. If I were a horse, there’s now no question where I would want to live. We enjoyed that drive as much as anything else that day.

For planning no more than a few days in advance we did pretty well in DC. The main thing was getting a reasonably priced hotel not too far out. We ended up at the Capitol Skyline about a mile south of the Capitol. It’s not too far from where we would dock our boat if we bring it up the Potomac next year. They had a morning shuttle from 7 to 10 that would deliver us anywhere around the mall. A cab ride back averaged $10.

Star Gazer on the hard across the Pamlico river from Washington, NC

It’s a long time since I last wrote anything. Star Gazer remains in Washington, NC and needs serious work. We missed stuff on our original work, so when we finally hauled the boat and looked carefully a couple of things showed up. First, as I had expected, some water had gotten back inside the double hull. Much of this probably from holes incorrectly drilled for depth sounding sensors or perhaps the ones for the large swim platform braces. We’ve had time to drain things properly. A new depth sensor is being installed, but all the old ones have to be reinstalled properly as well.

The second big issue was galvanic corrosion. On a boat improperly grounded metal objects exposed to seawater can slowly dissolve. The struts that hold the very long propeller shafts under the boat are victims of slow corrosion for maybe 20 years or more. They were eaten away from the inside so the damage was not apparent unless you really looked. If a strut failed the 30 inch prop with 375 hp driving it could go all over the place and cause significant damage. The boat is 27 years old so we can’t just go out and buy new struts, they have to be fabricated from stainless steel, which takes some time. Maybe we should have looked further earlier. Last year when we first visited Greg in Washington he said the voltages on our grounding system were not quite right, but we did not have time to check it out completely then.

It appears Star Gazer may not be back in the water until the first week of June. We did start early, but nearly two months of delay will get us on the late end of things. The loop still looks possible this year, and I think we will continue. It’s possible we could run out of time, with the weather getting too cold, while we are up in the north. If that happens we’ll find some dry storage for the boat and come back in about 6 or 7 months and resume the trip.

An alternative may be to go no further than the Hudson river and turn back to the south. This would allow us to be out in the Bahamas and Exumas this coming winter as we had been planning. Not sure what we will do yet. With boating we try not to plan more than a week or two ahead.

Have we ever had a tour guide as pleasant as Mr. Hayes? Possibly, but I can’t remember when

Up to now the weather, while cool, had been mostly sunny and pleasant. With a cold drizzly Saturday we made good on plans to see two houses, but wimped out on the third one and the Museum of the Confederacy. Both were restoration works in progress, so there was not as much as we like to see, but we did learn some history, especially about Mr. Marshall, who defined the function of the US Supreme court more than any other single person.

Instead we drove out to Buz and Ned’s Real Barbeque. Buz and Ned are apparently famous from some reality cooking show, and several people told us not to miss it. The lunch was great, but the cold weather got us to thinking about going up into the northern US and Canada. It will be summer, but some cold weather is still possible. Last year when October got cold in Norfolk VA we turned tail and ran south. It was time we faced up to the possibility of inclement weather like the brave seapersons of old.

Buz and Ned’s Real Barbecue. Definitely worth the trip. Especially with Goodwill nearby.

We didn’t have much warm clothing on board and weren’t ready for a trip back to Austin to get some, but Sue had spotted a Goodwill store on the way to the restaurant. By the time we left the store she felt she had balanced out our wardrobes for the loop. Yes, we will be throwing a few things out to make room.

Sunday came with promise of better weather. Sunday traffic allowed us to drive Monument Avenue slowly westward on the way to First Presbyterian Church, and to drive it slowly back afterwards. We liked the Lee and Jackson statues best, but the homes along that street are incredible. This was where the old money was spent in post war Richmond. If we’re back with warmer weather we need to walk both sides of that street.

We then went back westward for a drive through Carytown. Georgetown SC was cute, but the Carytown district of Richmond is the very definition of cute. It’s also perhaps the hardest place in the world to find a parking place, so we had no intention of stopping.

Midway through Carytown Sue spotted a Second Debut store. For those of you not accustomed to high end shopping, that is one of Goodwill’s outlets for their better stuff, such as designer label clothes. You won’t believe this, but as she spotted that on the left, I spotted a someone leaving a parking space on the right. With a cool head and nerves of steel forged from patiently parking 25 tons of boat under fire from wind and current, I snagged that space, and I have the picture to prove it. Sue got some good shopping in, and we had very good Gyros at the Greek restaurant in the picture.

Carytown: a continuous string of parked cars on either side with two continuous streams slowly moving past looking for a space. Ours is the white car in front of the Greek restaurant.

After this there was still time to visit the Museum of the Confederacy and the Confederate White House (Jefferson Davis’s house). While housing the “most complete collection of Confederate artifacts anywhere” the museum could be seen in two hours. The White House tour was great. After the war all its furnishings were sold off, but over the years nearly all of it has been given back by the various purchasers, so the house is completely decorated and furnished as it was originally.   The guide, Mr. Hayes was outstanding, making what would have to be a great tour regardless three times better. He’s a Vietnam vet and has been with the White House since that war. He really loves the place, knows everything about it as well as the history and ownership of all the furniture pieces that traveled away from and then back to the house. If you ever take this tour, make sure you get him as the guide.

We’ll get up early tomorrow. Monticello is only an hour away.

Sue (foreground) getting ready for favorite thing. Better than HGTV.

Thursday, our second day, we joined the spring garden tour in the Kingsley Street area of Richmond. All but one of the homes were in the same block, and the luncheon was at the Greek orthodox cathedral at the end of that block. The interiors were great. Lots of 18th and 19th century furniture. If they had any 20th they didn’t tell us.

After lunch we drove to the outbound part of the tour. The house at Tuckahoe plantation was built in 1733 and was the boyhood home of Thomas Jefferson until he was 10. It has remained in the Randall family until the present and one of the more interesting we have seen.

Tiffany lamps in my favorite part of the Fine Arts museum. Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

We also visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts before returning to our hotel Thursday. Admission is free and it’s open until 9 on Thursdays and Fridays so it’s easy to stop by if there is time left toward the end of one of those days. They had a special exhibition on flower painting with a works by Renoir, Monet, Manet, Gauguin and others. “Basket of Flowers on an Alabaster Pedestal” by Spaendonck was said by others to be more real than nature and I agree. To me the famous impressionist flower paintings seemed done by talented sixth graders in comparison. Of course my taste in modern art is less than notable.

Jefferson did know how to get the scale and the setting right for the state capitol.

Said to be accurate and perfect scale, the only statue George himself posed for.

We knew parking would be tight around the Virginia state capitol building on Friday so we used the shuttle to get there and back. A class of fourth graders had just started as we arrived, so we joined them and learned quite a lot about the oldest lawmaking body in America. Our tour guide was several cuts above average. It was plenty grand, but smaller than others such as Texas and California that we have seen. Probably because, designed by Thomas Jefferson, it’s so much older.

We had lunch at the Japanese Tea House at the Lewis Ginter botanical gardens. Spring is late this year and the day while sunny was pretty cold, so we didn’t see quite what we might have outdoors. The indoor conservatory and butterfly area was nice though. On the way back it was still afternoon so it was back to the Museum of Fine Arts until 8:30. The Amuse restaurant in the museum had an opening at 6:30 so we ate there also.

Conservatory at the Ginter Botannical gardens.

We hit some cold weather, and Saturday and Sunday will have rain, but we did hit the garden tour. It’s also restaurant week. That worked out nicely in Charleston last summer. The museum restaurant was participating, so things were fancier than we would normally have.

I called the visitor center and learned of six historic homes we could tour. We’ll see three of them that are walking distance from each other and the Museum of the Confederacy tomorrow. I asked the lady why she didn’t mention Tuckahoe and was told it’s a private residence and hardly ever open except for an occasional garden tour.

We crossed the Pamlico river, traveling a bit less than 2 miles to a small boatyard. Tides there are completely wind driven, and were about as low as they get, so we ended up slipping and sliding a bit over the mud in the entry channel to our destination. I’ll make sure the water level is higher before I leave there. Even a foot more will be enough. The engine controls failed just before we left, giving Greg a chance to see the problem first hand. He replaced the bad cable and we were off with just a small delay.

Sue in Halligan Bar and Grill. There was fireman related stuff all over.

The boat was hauled and on inspection no new issues showed up, so the known stuff could be dealt with. When Sue and I returned later in the day to get a few things from the boat for our trip there were five people working away. Hopefully it won’t take many days to get everything done.

I was thinking about staying on and getting in the way, but Sue insisted we leave for our Richmond trip. Richmond VA, the capital of the confederacy, is less than 3 hours from Washington. The Virginia countryside along the way was nice, but Richmond was larger and more interesting than we had imagined. A lot of the homes remind us more of New York City than other places we have been.

We got a room in the downtown Holiday Inn Express for Wednesday thru Friday nights. Parking in downtown Richmond is tight, but the hotel’s free shuttle was underutilized and available whenever we asked. With a nice tip each time it functioned as a cheap and rapid response taxi in the downtown area, and our rental car served if we ranged further, since then it was easier to park.

We spent our first afternoon and evening exploring the old part of down near the historic Main Street Train Station. There were many restaurants right around the station and we hit it good with a small fireman’s restaurant. The bar was made out of half of a big modern fire truck that had been sliced down the middle. I wondered what happened to the other half but the guy there was new and didn’t know.

Sue says she had a huge collection of everything. Best we’ve seen. Loaded with stuff.

We walked back to our hotel on Cary street. We’d heard about Carytown, but that was some miles at the other end of the street. This end was the Shockoe historic district. Many interesting restaurants and shops. The Antique Boutique had to have more things, none of them junk, than we had ever seen in such a place. Sue bought an old cup and saucer. Don’t ask where she’ll put it.

We saw enough this first day that we knew we needed a longer stay, so we extended our stay through Sunday night. That wasn’t easy because of a big NASCAR race in town, but a cancelation got us in the next day. At the train station also picked up a brochure for the annual Richmond Garden Club tour. It was for the next day! We just missed that in Charleston. Not this time.

Saw this just as I stepped onto the dock.

We’re still in Washington. We’ve had a storm system come across today. It was interesting watching it approach on MyRadar, a free iPhone/iPad app. The sky just before it hit was pretty dramatic.

Another shot from further away. A little enhancement because the side of our boat was completely dark.

Just before it broke the sun was shining from the right on the town.

It was nice weather just before the front moved in. The prom was that day and many of the kids came down for photos by the water. They had a good chance to get them before things started. Still some were running for it as things started up. With that black sky warning hardly anyone got wet.

Many different photo settings along the docks

The cyclists are off for the day. Saturday farmer’s market with Star Gazer in the background.

We got to Washington NC on Tuesday about 1:30 after we overnighted in Oriental. It rained off and on all day, but was not cold, so we were comfortable up on the fly bridge with a few of the windows opened or not, depending on the rain. This is our second time here. Both times we came to have Greg work on the boat.

Greg, a fiberglass guy and two wood working/cabinetry guys have been on the boat so far. Catfish, a diver, checked us out underneath and found the source of the banging we heard the last day running up here. Seems our last grounding loosened the line cutter that wraps around the starboard shaft. The props look good, however. We get hauled (the boat is taken onto dry land) on Monday. We need to come out to install a new forward looking sonar as well as reinstall two other sensors that were not put in quite right.

Yesterday (Friday), today and tomorrow is a big bike ride with some hundreds of participants. All the parking and parking lots anywhere around are filled with motor homes, small trailers, tent trailers or just minivans with all sorts of bike racks. Each day there are a number of courses ranging from 5 to over 100 miles long, with support vans circulating for breakdowns, bicycle or human. It’s not a race, and they’re not out to cure cancer or anything, it’s just for fun.

It was Music in the Streets night last night with everything else. This group was back this morning.

There’s also a small farmers market here today. A group of guys are starting a model railroad club are outside with it. They have a fair sized operating layout outside, so it’s good that it’s not raining much today.

After we get the boat to the yard and hauled on Monday, we’re thinking of a road trip to Richmond VA. It was the capital of the confederacy and is less than 3 hours away.

We first saw homes along one of the wider portions of the North Carolina ICW.

We left Dudley marina at the late hour of 8:00 for a good travel day with great weather. No drawbridges, no groundings, no excitement at all. The scenery was great. The marshes of Georgia are nice but we like the trees of North Carolina even better. We pulled into Oriental Marina on the Neuse river at 1:30. The Neuse averages over 3 miles wide with nearly all of its area at an even 20 foot depth. Just enough of the winds bleed over from the outer banks coastal area to make this the “sailboat capital of the world” according to the locals. We’ve been to Oriental once before, but that time we stayed at Whittaker Pointe marina.

Morehead City port. You take a hard left and go between Morehead City and Beaufort, leaving the coastal area.

Shortly after we pulled in at Oriental, Camelot pulled in with Ken and Lois. They had their looper flag up front like us, but have business to take care of along the way before New York and so will soon fall about a month behind us. It’s always interesting talking to other boaters because we have so much in common: our boats! These things take up a tremendous amount of time, thought and effort. Boats are always breaking and just getting from here to there, as we saw yesterday, can be challenge. It’s not just the travel. The women trade tips and tricks about living on a boat, which has a different set of challenges from our land based life.

Of course we look at each other’s boats. The thing I liked most on theirs was that it had a nice double bed into the front guest bedroom. This is something I wanted when we were looking for a boat. Ours has a lot of great features, but its front V berth beds are not the best.

We then headed north on the Adams Creek canal which exits into the 3 mile wide Neuse river.

People coming to travel with us ask how long we can stand to have them with us. Sue and I have a huge bedroom and our own bath in the back. We’ll be fine. Guests only need to see how long they can stand the guest quarters. Actually, with us happy in the back, guests do have the rest of the boat to themselves at night, with an additional third bedroom and bath if those are convenient for them, as well as the couch in the salon which also makes into a bed.

While we talked to Ken and Lois a fellow DeFever couple who also just pulled in came by and commented about passing us when we were aground yesterday. Looks like we’re becoming more known in the boating community.

Our first towboat experience. His prop wash is clearing mud from underneath us.

We made our goal of Dudley’s Marina in Cedar Point NC, but not until 6:30 PM today. We started at 6:30 this morning so that’s 12 hours underway. We had three big delays. First we ran aground about 3 miles north of our starting point. Active Captain said to get WAY over to the red side to safely pass a shoal. I got over too soon. As we were stuck we watched locals still in the middle of the channel where we were to the west side. They got up to the hazard area and veered sharply almost to the dock ends of the west side, went about 100 feet and then veered sharply back to the center of the channel.

We called BoatUS. It’s like triple A on the water and we’re a member. A small, at least compared to us, tow boat came out, hooked to our boat and pulled us toward the center of the channel. That little boat just pulling would never get us off, but its prop wash blew away much of the mud and sand we were in, freeing us up enough to pull us off.

We were fine after that and continued on, but it took three hours for him to get to us and do his thing! We have never had a significant grounding until two days ago, and now today. Hopefully this will not become a trend.

A little later we were 10 miles out from the Surf City swing bridge which opens every hour. It was a few minutes after 11, so with a current against us we would be about five minutes late for the 12:00 opening. I slowed way down and we made the 1:00 opening. Another hour. This is not the first trouble I’ve had with this bridge! These delays can happen to us, but usually we can time it so our average wait for these kind of bridges is 15 minutes or less.

Finally, when I passed another boat going the same way he commented that I might not really want to go very fast because the marines had live fire exercises at Camp Lejeune 15 miles ahead and had shut down the ICW for a 10 mile stretch past the base. This was at 1:30 and the ICW would not open until 5 PM! Our charts have the phone number of the fire control officer so I called him for details. Live fire will commence again very early tomorrow morning, so stopping just short of the base for the night would not work

We slowed to 4 mph, which got us to the base boundary at 5 when it reopened. As we neared the base it was apparent the guns being fired were large ones. I could feel the deck shake from some of them.

Today was the only day we’ve ever had where delays totaled more than an hour. I don’t think we’ve had more than 3 travel days where we did get an hours worth. So I don’t see this sort of thing happening much.

Two more travel days and we’ll be in Washington.

The festival had many  princesses. Three posed outside the window by the table where we ate lunch. Our boat could dock on the other side of the building seen to the left.

After that grounding yesterday we deserved a rest. We called Bridge Tender marina in Wrightsville Beach, to the east of Wilmington NC, for a reservation. They were full. This weekend had been all reserved there for a year! They said some part of an Azalea festival was going on over there. Last year it was a movie. Anyway I called Seapath Yacht Club across the river and they had space. When I asked about this festival he told me it was mostly in downtown Wilmington and would draw an extra 100,000 people there. He said to stay away from that area, it would be crazy over the weekend.

Crazy sounded great to us, so I asked for an extra night at Seapath. On the way in we passed Bridge Tender and indeed the docks and a huge deck that goes over a lot of the docks were completely full of people. Sue thought something might collapse.

We reserved a cab to take us to the south edge of the historic district where the festival parade would start at 9:30 this morning, right up to where all the streets were blocked off. The meter read $21 when we got there, so it was not so far.

Some downtown Wilmington buildings.

The historic district is quite a find! Just getting there we passed historic mansions. One of those we toured later and another is a must see for next year. Across the river is the battleship North Carolina. Apparently much more of that ship is open to the public than is the case of most of the US battleships available for tour. We’ll have to see that too.

The Belamy Mansion Museum with Sue and the traffic police in front.

Next year we’ll bring the boat the extra 20 miles up the Cape Fear river and stay at the City Docks about 50 feet from where we ate lunch today.

We toured two active coast guard ships and the Belamy Mansion museum. The Parade on 3^rd Street started at Market. The floats lined up “bumper to bumper” on 3^rd and the bands linked up with a bit more space between them on lower Market. This gave us a great opportunity to review the entire parade. The floats waited quietly, but most of the bands practiced, which was fun to see. Some of their dancers were such high steppers it seemed they would have little energy left once they got onto the parade route.

One of the bands and marching groups. These fed from Market St. Floats from 3rd.

We toured two Coast Guard ships. This 200 footer was the largest.

Star Gazer will spend a few days in the historic district next year.