Dallas is officially back home as I type this :) These are a few of his photos from the week. He'll be putting together a video soon for the trip too. I thought it might be fun (or exhausting) to hear how we wrap things up at the end of trips like this from our perspective. If nothing else it'll be fun to look back on a few decades down the road when we can say, "man, no wonder we feel worn out these days" :)
For Dallas, his day started around 6:50am with Tazy up in Staniel Cay. They got up, jumped in the boat and started their long tow back to Great Exuma. Today we had some very strong winds, around 20 mph straight down the cays, so he didn't really have a leeward side of the islands to stay on to make it easier on him. Straight in his face the whole time. It was a very wet and bumpy ride for the two of them. Two snapped tow ropes + big waves + boats that don't want to stay in a straight line + 5.5 hours later= meeting me out in Barraterre.
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| Our pilot from Staniel Cay, John Chamberlain always looks for Dallas and the boat when flying our guests back and tries to buzz them when they fly by! |
Rewind a bit for my start of the day. My boys and I get up and get going...nice and slow at first, just the way we like it. I load up our little car with all the luggage from all the guests that got stored with us for the week. For 11 people, it really wasn't that much, but it just barely fit in my little car. The boys and I looked like little clowns driving around.
{Side note- just to give you the full picture: as I'm pulling out of my driveway, I forget something inside, jump out, go get it, jump back in, forget one more thing from the work shed, jump out, go get it, climb back in, shoo my crazy little dog out of the car 2 different times, and then finally we're underway, get to the end of our main road and stop to dump the garbage and who is there, but my crazy little dog. Have to take her back and make sure she stays this time... THEN, we are finally going.}
I went to pick up a suburban that the Exuma Foundation let us borrow since our truck is still down (going on 3-4 weeks now). I switched the luggage from the little clown car to the big ole "Sore-bin" as my boys call it, and headed for the airport to meet our first round of guests. The plane can only carry about 5-6 at a time, so we had to do 2 flights for the group. Met the first group at the private terminal, gave them t-shirts, did the luggage shuffle, and shuttled them just around the corner to the airport to wait for their outbound flight. Said my good-byes to the group and then "rinse & repeat" for the second flight. Some folks on this flight were staying an extra night and Dallas said his tow-back was going super slow, so I had time to run them into town to their hotel before heading out to meet Dallas and Tazy at the other end of the island in Barraterre.
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| Steve giving Carrie a turn with the sexton to pinpoint their position on this beautiful place called Earth! |
On the drive out to Barraterre, my boys have a blast playing their games on the phone and iPad. It buys me a bit of sanity, and there's only so many times we can play I-spy on a route we do so often. We stopped to pick up a lady with her two little girls that needed a ride (hitch hiking is just a way of getting around down here), and the boys had a blast talking to them :)
I made it out to Barraterre about 40 minutes after leaving the airport, grabbed a sea pearl trailer from the guy out there that lets us store things in his yard and head over for the ramp. As I'm reversing the trailer down the ramp, Dallas pulls up with the boats. PERFECT TIMING!
We had a little glitch with the 'sore-bin' while towing the first boat out of the water, so "who ya gonna call?" MY DADDY! This man knows his way around cars. He told us exactly what to check and how to fix it, and we did. Thanks Again, Dad!!! ;) Now that we were back on track, we finish towing the boat out, haul it down the road to the storage yard, rinse the trailer with fresh water and pick-up the next trailer to get the 2 boat. Repeat this process 4 times and we're done getting all the boats out. Each boat coming out takes a load of gear out of the powerboat too to lighten Dallas' haul on the final stretch of his trip. Once the final boat is out, that one stays hitched up and I start driving back home as Dallas and Tazy drive the boat the final stretch home as well.
This particular tow back day, we ended on the beach right by our house with the powerboat. We plan to take it to regatta a lot this week so it's easier to just leave it here instead of in town in the middle of the crowds. So, once we're home the car gets emptied of all the gear, then we drive down to the beach, load it up again, drive to our house, unload, drive back down, load it up again, then drive back to our house and unload the finally bit of gear. There are two big piles of gear in the yard and driveway to be cleaned and put away... then over this next week as we're going out to Barraterre to launch kayakers and such we'll pick up the remaining boats one by one and bring them back home.
The cleaning gets saved for tomorrow... Dallas, Tazy & myself are all about to drop where we stand and are slab-dab-worn-out after a long, hard, but good day's work! Eye-yi-yiiii, that's probably way more info that you really wanted to hear, but it's part of it :)
Hoping to keep at the blogging better now, this week has been fun! Feel free to comment and leave a note if there's anything in particular you'd like to see us post on here sometime. Thanks again for following!
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