NYC, Day 3

Day 2 saw us do a few hard-core touristy things, including climbing the Empire State Building. Seriously, we took a 15 second (yes, 15 second) elevator ride to the 80th floor, then one almost as long to the 86th floor observatory and wowee! It's really true, if you haven't seen NY from there, you haven't seen it at all! Another shot of central Park(different every five minutes) and one of me seen at the Castle at Central Park. On day three, we saw the Metropolitan museum of Art, wonderful!

The Big Apple, Day One

These shots are proof that we made it this far! And still on a shoe-string budget!

We are presently moored at the 79th Street Boat Basin, a grand affair built in 1937 for the World's fair. We are a mere half hour walk to Broadway! How unusual to be this close to so much humanity and stil come home to our cozy wee nest, dinner on the table.

The first picture is taken from Nyack at 20 miles, sky scrapers just coming into view. The top right is yet another farmer's market, on Broadway, if you please. More corn, Mr. Hammerstein? Then comes the 79th St. Basin, the Geo. Washington Bridge, James, Caroline & Jocelyn just before Time Square. Then the Reservoir at Central Park.

Jim says the Big Apple is much cleaner and more calm than he remembers as a boy visiting NYC. Even among the 10 mil that live here, we didn't really feel the "crush" of humanity that can plague a big city.

We basically walked around on night 1, saw many beautiful buildings, almost all apartments. Day 2 had us picnicking in Central Park, then to the Guggenheim Art Gallery. The park is stellar and the Gallery is very interesting. The building was covered with a scaffold, so we couldn't really see this unusually shaped, spiral wrapped beauty. The main show was Richard Prince, not really my cup of tea, but glad we finally saw it.

The Beautiful (no, Really!) Hudson Valley

We are presently anchored off the town of Nyack, New York, see top left picture, just 20 miles upstream from The Big Apple. We have been travelling slowly and comfortably at around 19-20 miles a day. The weather has been just incredible! Sunday night, we were anchored off some lonely stretch of the Hudson River, having dinner up on deck after dark, wearing just our scivies! The temperature was 80F and the sunset was an argument between good, pink twilight and bad, evil clouds of thuderous tumult. We lived!
Some of the real estate along this river is pretty spectacular, rivalling Newport, Rhode Island and its "Millionair's Row" Some beautiful castles, wide open river, interesting boat traffic. The Hudson Valley itself is just plain beautiful. The trees are starting to turn, making for lovely hillsides and rock faces. Lotsa tug/barge traffic! One tug even had a "Toodle" pipe, lovely church-organ sound.
As for the boat, we put the mast up at Castleton, NY, and took her for a spin the next day. She sailed well with just the main up, the day after, Jim finished installing an inner stay, so we then flew a jib. Not nearly enough wind, so we abandoned that, but the rigging sure looks great!
From Cape Vincent to Waterford we were able to tie off on free (love that word!) public docks. From there on in we've been anchoring in good muddy bottom. Betcha didn't know that having a muddy bottom could be good, huh?
Will put up some pikkies when I bring the laptop ashore next, until then, tah-rah!

Waterford, New York, Southbound on the Hudson River.

We have just finished the first two legs of the NY Canal System; the Oswego & the Erie. After a two day stop, we will start down the Hudson River, named after the same Henry Hudson that accidentally dicovered that pesky bay that prevented him from ever reaching India...did you know the poor guy was mutinied and set adrift in the Hudson's Bay?

Anyhow, Waterford is quite pretty. Most of the buildings are in good shape, as opposed to some of the poorer towns we saw on the way down. The severe flooding that damaged the NY Canal system two springs ago must have nailed their poor coffins shut. Some towns were dead on their feet and that flood knocked right down. We chatted with one lockkeeper about how his lockstation fared. He lost his lockhouse and much of the dam. Work had been underway to rebuild the dam, on Lock#10, one abuttment was almost done when the water swept the it and one other away. Alond the way, you could see which locks were still being rebuilt after the flood and which one were untouched. The unharmed ones were all freshly painted and looking great. The damaged ones looked as though they were putting off repainting until all the work was done. There was still a lot of work to go!

Anyhow, we're starting to meet more people now. Along the way, we met but did'nt get to know other boaters because they were in such a hurry to get south. We, however, are taking our time and visiting the areas we are in. Now that we are in a common rest and fuelling up stop for boaters, they too are taking advantage of the two free days dockage, so they have time to shmooze. Most are seasonal boaters who still have houses, cars and mortagages to get back to. Others are out for the two or three years sabbatical from work. Still others have gone no further than their two week vacation will take them. We've met only a few other couple who are out there permanently, like us.

Life has been very relaxing and quiet. As soon as I feel tired of that and need some fun, I figure I'll crawl out from under this rock and start being more friendly toward other boaters. I think I've depressurized from owning and operating a very busy cafe and am getting ready to start focussing on what I'm doing!

Farmer's Markets Across the Borders!

Whoopie! Food at last!

Although you can't see the vegetable stalls in this shot, the farmers market in Kingston was really quite nice! This year's harvest didn't reap too many new things, but it's alwayy great to see old friends; we joyed a cucumber and tomato salad, curried lentils and Cous Cous that night!

This next shot is of the Farmer's Market in Oswego, New York. Intelligently, it goes from 5-9pm Thursday evenings. They, too, featured live music, quite a few veg stall and specialty goods like bakery items and honey. The only thing we missed was a charcuterie or butcher. We bought some late season corn, and it was so good, we were able to go back for more. We stayed until the band almost finished, they played everything from Johnny Cash to Prince!

This is the interior of our wee boaty! The first view is the galley, note the ample cupboard space! All hand made by my talented hubby! The next one down is the settee, complete with a solid teak table. That metal thing halfway up the wall is a cabin heater. The last is a shot taken from the very forward end of our double berth, you can see our open-shelf lockers and hanging locker, which is completely crammed with my stuff. I was thinking I would have to leave my beautiful guitar behind, but managed to find a home for it. We have cargo-nets hanging below some bookshelves in the berth area, so it mostly lives there.

The whole boat is just big enough for two to live aboard, warm when it needs to be, cool likewise. Jim & I tended to spend much of our time together anyhow, hard to imagine we could could spend EVEN MORE time together, but we do. We spend about 25% of our time actually moving the boat, so one will helm and the other relaxes, reads, knits, keeps an eye on the chart to prepare for our next landing.

I find the whole experience to be enjoyable so far, and certainly no hardship! I think I'm going to like cruising for a while yet!

Trancendent Gypsy Socks

This one project has been with me since April of this year. I bought some lovely sock yarn at my local yarn shop, "Winter Eclipse" is a variegated mauve-purple-grey-midnightblue affair that does indeed look a little winter-eclipse-y. I cast on toe#1 back in the cold snowy spring in kemptville, got around to turning the heel on a warm evening in June, started the ankle the week before moving on board the boat. I finally had time to finish Sock One and am a quarter of the way up Sock Two. These socks will be a birthday present for my older daughter, who must continue to trudge the Canadian Snows. At least she'll do it in comfy warm socks, (and hopefully some kind of shoe!) And now I understand what earlier yarn-prophetesses mean by the phrase "Every stitch is crafted with love", it really is true. This is the second pair of socks I have knit for either of my kids, and the previous pair gave me reason to think about my children and pray for them, send them warm thoughts, good zen-like-karma, you know...hope they turn out all right! I'll be a little sad when this project ends, but am looking forward to the next: a shawl. But you don't know who it's for!