Blue Turtle Cruising

Life gets in the way sometimes

Hi there. Remember me? I used to post quite regularly here about cruising and living aboard. I have to say that you really haven’t miss much since my last post back in May. Where has the time gone? It seems like life sometimes just gets in the way of our cruising and posting regularly. With a teenage boy, we’ve come to realize now that sometimes his schedule doesn’t always coincide with our cruising plans. That, and a lot of travel this summer kept us from having anything to post here. Finally it’s cooled off down here and we actually got off the dock last weekend! I’ll be writing about that trip in an upcoming post. In the meantime, I figured I’d catch you guys up on what we’ve been up to all summer. For those here just interested in cruising and living aboard content, you can stop reading now and look for our upcoming posts about Franklin Locks and the Fort Myers Beach Christmas Boat Parade.

So as you know, summers here are miserably hot and we typically take a little hiatus from cruising unless we have a passage to the Dry Tortugas planned. This summer we didn’t cruise south to the Drys and instead we took a family bucket-list trip to Alaska with my parents, sister and nephews to celebrate my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. What can I say, it was simply A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! What a crazy change it was to be in the mountains near glaciers instead of the tropics! We took a week-long cruise from Vancouver, BC to Seward, AK. As soon as we got off the ship, we hopped onto another boat for an 8-hour cruise along the Kenai Fjords National Park, which was simply awesome! Then, after a train ride to Anchorage we rented cars and drove to the awe-inspiring Denali National Park where we stayed in cabins for several days to explore the park.  It was the family trip of a lifetime—one we will never forget.

After Alaska, Corey headed to Chicago for several weeks to get some wakeboarding in with his coach, Nick and also to compete in a competition. Randy and I took a couple of work-related trips to the Smokey Mountains area. The company Randy works for is headquartered in Knoxville, so we took advantage of his meetings there by driving up with Sophie (our dachshund) and staying in some cabins in the Smokey’s. For those who know us well, you know how much we love to hike. It was so nice to be able to spend time outdoors in the mountains when we are normally hibernating in the air conditioned cabin in Blue Turtle. Randy’s job also sent him to Grand Turk and I, of course, tagged along. Since we love scuba diving, we took advantage of the gorgeous reefs there and dove several times. The reefs there are so pristine compared to the reefs in the Florida Keys. It was stunning!

Once we were back from traveling, we had a couple boat projects to tend to including fixing a hydraulic leak in the steering. After the projects were completed we were ready to get off the dock. Unfortunately, red tide has been in the area for the last several weeks. It wasn’t as bad as last year but enough to make Randy’s allergies act up, so we were pretty much land-locked until last weekend when we headed up the river to Franklin Locks.

We’re hoping to get off the dock a lot more in the coming months to take advantage of the winter temps. We really missed cruising to the Keys and Dry Tortugas this summer but sometimes life gets in the way with juggling work, Corey’s schedule and family trips. After 7-1/2 years living aboard and cruising, sometimes it’s nice to have a change of scenery and perspective that traveling gives you. It’s also nice to get a break from the boat from time to time. Our time traveling and staying on land really made us miss Blue Turtle and being on the water.

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