RichH wrote:

Nice post Rosealie.
I havent been up that way in some time, so your posting inspires me to
do so.

Still have those hand painted screens on your ports?

regards
RichH

Yes we do. I have to redo the ones that are on the stern as the
engine smokes them up, and some of the earlier ones are getting faded.
Maybe later this winter I'll do that.

I read what I wrote to Bob and he had some corrections.

Bob said it only took him a half hour each way to walk home from the
dock in Leonardtown. Many people stopped by the boat and one of them
was a lady who was from Ireland and her husband. They were worried
about Bob walking home, so they got in their car and went and looked
for him. But he was already almost back.

Bob say he did not have an oyster po-boy for lunch in Colonial Beach -
it was a shrimp po-boy. I didn't take a photo of it because my camera
battery ran out at that moment.

This sentence ...
at first the lady thought the explosion noises were from
Dalgren, but a friend called and told her to look out her marina.
should have said "look out her window at the marina"

The antique sailboat in front of us in Colonial Beach wasn't a wooden
boat - it was steel.

In Quantico Tuesday morning, Bob had to put extra fenders out because
the wind was blowing us against the pier so hard.

More about our adventures in Colonial Beach

Our trip down the river from Quantico was 34.7 nm (a mile farther than
on the way up because of having to detour over to Swan's Point), and
our average speed was 5.7 knots, which was 0.6 knot faster probably
due to our going down the river rather than up. The maximum speed was
7.3 knots which was much faster than before.

Anyway, because Bob was annoyed and so was I, I walked over to use the
bathrooms and talked to (complained) the folks there by the shop about
our 'welcome' to the marina.

When the office lady came back, she said she had phoned my cell phone
and left a message about the pump out slip. Which mollified me
somewhat, but I still don't see why, when I told her that we would be
there between 11 and 12, everyone decided to go to lunch at the same
time at 11:30. She remarked that I must be the first person who
arrived at the time that I had said I would. I paid for 3 days,
planning to leave Saturday because it was predicted to be really windy
again on Thursday and to start to rain, and to rain all day on Friday.

I decided I wanted to rent a golf cart and see what there was to see
in Colonial Beach. There's a trolley in the season, but not at this
time of year. The marina office lady called for me, and they came and
picked us up and gave us a gas golf cart with rain curtains. I signed
for it. Bob didn't think much of the idea as he said we could rent a
car for a week for that price ($61/day).

We got the cart for Weds and Thurs and they waived the $15 overnight
fee and gave us $10 discount for the rental not being on the weekend.
I figured I could see what I could on Wednesday when it wasn't
raining, and then Thursday before the rain started, and then we could
go to lunch and dinner on Thursday and just eat at the marina on
Friday.

After we got the cart, I drove it across the street to Fat Freda's
(Best Sandwiches on the Beach). [The marina restaurant isn't open
until 3 on Weds. anyway] Bob had a pulled pork sandwich and I had the
special which was the chicken cranberry chutney salad. ($6.99). After
lunch, I made Bob drive. The cart would lurch wildly and backfire if
you tried to drive it slowly, so you had to put your foot down.
Sometimes it would also backfire at stop signs. The turn signals did
not cancel, so you had to be careful not to leave them especially
overnight.

We went by the museum (which is only open Sat and Sun but is free),
and along Monroe Bay Ave. to the marina. Monroe Bay is the inlet that
goes into the middle of Colonial Beach. Then we (or at least I) had a
nap because we got up so early in the morning. Bob also installed
the direct TV receiver.

At about 4:30 we went out again to find a place to eat dinner, and we
drove along the Potomac side. I had picked out some things to see,
and restaurants to find. First we went by Bell House which is now a
bed and breakfast. It used to be where Alexander Graham Bell spent
his summers as a child.

We drove over most of the town. There were some places where only
golf carts and bicycles were allowed - no cars. I was looking for
churches and cemeteries, but there were no cemeteries. We passed a
little house with two huge (4 feet high) Fu Dogs, but I missed getting
a photo of them. The town was festooned with For Sale signs on many
houses, and other places have already started to put up decorations
for Halloween. We saw the Post Office, the school athletic field,
Lenny's Restaurant (out of business), the American Legion Hall, the
Hunan Dinner (Chinese), and debated between going to the Riverboat on
the Potomac (off track betting and a restaurant) or High Tides for
dinner. Eventually we picked High Tides.

We sat by the window, and I watched a little boy playing on the sand.
He was chasing some female mallard ducks. I had a cup of the soup of
the day which was seafood gumbo to start - it was VERY spicy. Bob
also had a cup of soup. We both had virgin pina colas. Bob had a
Fish and Chips Basket (appetizer) $8.99, and I had the coconut shrimp
appetizer $9.99. While we were eating, we saw a lady come ashore in
a kayak - she was a bit wet.

After we ate, we came home and put the side curtains down on the golf
cart went to bed

Thursday morning we were up fairly early. I used the golf cart to go
to the bathrooms which are a bit of a walk. Bob looked at the holding
tanks and said the forward one was full, and the aft one was
definitely not, but we should use the marina bathrooms whenever
possible and just wait to get a pumpout until we got back to our
marina.

Whenever I asked where I could do the internet, everyone said the
library. So I tried to call the library but it did not answer at 9 or
at 10. Eventually I called the town hall and she said that on
Thursday, they opened at one and were open until 9 pm. She did not
know whether they had only their own computers or if they had wi-fi.
It had started to rain, so I was writing up the previous day's trips
on the computer on the boat.

The tides were VERY high and up over the parking lots and into the
streets in a lot of cases. On our floating dock, there is a ramp to a
fixed dock and the ramp goes DOWN to the fixed dock at high tide.

So about 11:30, we put on our rain gear and went out to get lunch. We
saw a restaurant called the Happy Clam yesterday and decided to eat
there. This restaurant was formerly called the Lighthouse. It was
part of, or next to, a seafood store and the Bayside Marina. There
are a lot of marinas along the west side of Monroe Bay but I'm not
sure we could get into them with a 5 foot draft. Bayside is one of
them.

I had hot tea and shrimp salad with hush puppies. Bob had soup and
tuna salad and cole slaw. Then we both wanted coconut cake, but it
apparently hadn't 'set up' yet, so Bob had double chocolate cake and I
had chocolate pie.

We got to the library about a half hour before it opened, and I walked
around town a little bit while we waited. When we got in, they had
BOTH wi-fi and their own computers. Not only that, but if they aren't
open, you can sit outside and still use it. So Bob went back and got
my computer while I worked on their computer. Then he sat and read a
book while I computed. About 5, he said he was tired of reading, so
we went back to the marina, and I dropped him off and went back to the
library.

It was still light when I got back there and I tried to figure out how
to turn on the golf cart lights, but Bob said the switch didn't seem
to work and I couldn't make them turn on with any other switch I tried
either. I did eventually get the emergency flashers to work. I kept
on doing the internet there and sent the previous emails until about
7:30 and then I was tired. A scout master that was talking to the
librarians went out with me to see if he could figure out the switch
but he said the thought it was broken, but at least the cart was
white. He also said I'd get a ticket for driving without lights.

I set out to drive back to the marina. It was raining lightly and
there are no windshield wipers on the cart so when there were street
lights, they glared off the window and I couldn't see. And when there
weren't street lights I could just barely make out the reflection of
the center line on the road in the dim light of the flashers. I
couldn't tell whether there was water over the road or whether the
shoulder of the road had a drop off (or if there even was a shoulder)
either. Nor could I see any road signs. A couple of times I got out
and wiped the window off with my rain gear sleeve, but it didn't help
for long.

So whenever I saw any kind of car headlights, I pulled as far off the
road as I dared and stopped and sat there flashing until the car was
out of sight. I was a bit worried about the police and I wanted to be
a sort of stealth ghost golf cart, but this goal was more or less
thwarted by the golf cart tendency to backfire whenever I slowed down.
Eventually I got back to the marina and parked and locked the cart
(after writing THIS CART HAS NO LIGHTS on the tag on the wheel), and I
put the keys in the marina mailbox.

Friday: We hung around the boat and watched TV. When I booted up
this computer to download pictures none of the USB ports worked. I
finally turned it off and turned back on again and then they worked. I
tried to get the virus definitions to download in the library and they
wouldn't download. So now it wants updates and it can't have them.

Bob washed the waterline down about a foot under water on the dock
side. He says we have to haul the boat after we get back, and the
zippers on the enclosure are deteriorating so we need a whole new
bimini (which is 10 years old), dodger and side curtains. We had the
last of the roast beef for lunch. I tried booting up the Toshiba a
couple of times and once it did and once it didn't.

There is a mute swan in this section of the marina which is eating
stuff off the floats of the floating docks. No one else has come in
to the marina since we got here Weds..

We plan to go back to our home marina tomorrow. Bob is worried about
the possibility of fog tomorrow because outside of the inlet there are
lots of crab pots. If there is wind there probably won't be fog, but
there might be rain.

We went up to eat dinner at the restaurant and this time the salads
were better. Bob had clam chowder and fried oysters with a baked
potato and cole slaw, and I had a ribeye with mashed potatoes. I
brought most of the ribeye home with me as I couldn't eat it all. It
was raining again when we finished, but it wasn't raining hard, so it
didn't matter much that we didn't have our rain gear.