I Am a Dork. Big Time.

I can't keep my dorkitude a secret. It comes out most times when I open my mouth. And then there are the times when I shouldn't be let out in public without a chaperone that will clamp my mouth shut at just the right time.

Years ago I was working at a company that had a cafeteria in the building. My co-worker Kristin and I went to get lunch one day. I said to her, "I am going to check out the soup." She didn't say anything back. For some reason I'd just assumed she'd follow me to check out the soup too. I mean, why wouldn't she? This is my story, after all. I am the main character, and the other characters are supposed to hover around me at all times.

Not so. Kristin, a person in real life and not a character in this story, went to the salad bar. But I swore she was just behind my left shoulder. After all, she was wearing a white shirt that day. She's tall and has dark hair. I turned to Kristin and put on my best Homer Simpson voice and said something scintillating like "Lentil soup.... uh huh huh huh..."

Of course, it wasn't Kristin standing there. Of course it was some impossibly handsome man. And of course he looked at me as if I was a complete weirdo. Because why wouldn't he? Then this is the part where the main character of the story says something very witty that intrigues the impossibly handsome man. Then he woos me with floral arrangements, and we end up together under a setting sun.

My witty response didn't come out so well. Mouth dry, I let out a squeak of some sort and then ran away from impossibly handsome man. I found Kristin selecting lettuce, and I immediately doubled over in laughter. Then of course I had to tell her what happened. And she laughed too. Then all of our co-workers laughed back at the office just after she finished the sentence starting with "Guess what Beej did at lunch today..." They all leaned in to listen, because I am always doing or saying something dorky. For months I was asked whether I wanted to go to the cafeteria to get some lentil soup.

Just the other day I was driving home from work. I stopped in at the convenience store at the truck stop to get an ingredient for dinner. There were a few people milling around near the cash register. The radio in the store was blasting and they were talking about the music. I joined the conversation, and a few minutes later s Sheryl Crow song came on.

I hate Sheryl Crow's music. I have often wondered how the hell she managed to get so famous with that scratchy and whiny voice of hers.

"Ugh. Sheryl Crow," I groaned. "She makes my teeth itch."

One of the men I was talking to laughed, "Makes my teeth itch? That's a good one. I'll have to remember that..."

The kicker? When the man opened his mouth to laugh he had one tooth in his mouth. One.

And then I may have let out a squeak and ran out of the store.

The Island

Wasn't there some horror movie called 'The Island'? Let me tell you about a happy and peaceful island where we anchored on Thursday night of our vacation. Now that I have a computer again I can resume being a good blogger and actually, you know, post.
Thursday morning found us still moored in Plattsburgh with a disassembled shower drain pump. Luckily the Plattsburgh Boat Basin has a really good ship's store. (Where the hell did they get those rolls of paper towels from? I never seen any that large. I'll have them until the end of time!) Todd had ripped out the old and malfunctioning pump and replaced it. Then we learned that we needed to replace the drain hose for fear that it's clogged with coagulated hair and soap. And what the hell, while we're in there let's just rewire the thing and call it done.  We've gotten pretty good at projects like this. We can do them relatively quickly and we know exactly how to accomplish these tasks. We untied our self-made mooring and headed south.

We picked Spoon Bay on the northeast corner of the island for our spot to anchor on Thursday night. The wind either blows dead north or dead south on Champlain because the lake is so narrow and it has mountains on either side. As we were headed to Valcour Island it was coming out of the south, but we knew that over night it would pull a 180 and come out of the north overnight. But we are confident in our anchor and miles of chain and knew it wouldn't be a problem.

We settled in for the night. Todd occasionally gets up to check on the anchor while I am asleep. (And then he has to shove me back to my side of the bed because sleeping me always sprawls the moment he leaves our bed.) I woke up and felt Sabine rocking harder than when we went to sleep.

"It's really blowing out there, wind's changed direction," Todd whispered to me. I grumbled "Mmmm hmmmm..." and probably said "Shhhh.... sleeping" because that's what I always say when he wakes me up in the middle of the night.

At around 5 in the morning Sabine was getting tossed around like a bathtub toy. Our bed is in the very back of the boat. If you picture a boat rocking on waves you'll see that the very center of the boat moves the least, and the very back and the very front move up and down with greater frequency. I couldn't fall back asleep with all the motion. I wanted to. I burrowed deeper into the covers willing the wind to die down until I drifted off again.

Sunrise came, we took the dogs ashore for their morning business meeting. We met a woman walking her dogs and asked her what was on the island. "Nothing but trails. It's beautiful. You really need to check it out." We shrugged, knowing we had some miles to cover that day to get closer to Chipman Point on the southern part of the lake. And then the "When are we going to be here next?" question hung between us.

We walked the shortest trail while the dogs raced out in front, then ran back to see what was taking us so long. They do this when we hike. They run out in front on the trail, and come back and circle us in their excitement. They probably hike four times the actual distance we cover every time we're in the woods.

Once back in the dinghy we marveled at the pristine, uninhabited paradise we were leaving that morning and wished we could stay longer. We pulled up the anchor and headed south to Cole Bay, instead.

Thwarted

I am not afraid to admit it.  They're out to get me.  It would seem that every piece of technology I've touched lately has in one way or another stopped me from getting to point B.

First it was while we were on the 2 week leg of the trip this summer.  I filled my camera's memory card.  "No problem," I thought.  "I'll just dump these onto Todd's laptop."  I pulled the card out, slid it into the laptop, copied and pasted.

"What are you doing?" he asked.  I told him that I was loading my pictures on to the computer to get them out of my camera.

"Hey, what's with this funny icon?" I asked.  He took the computer from me. 

"Beej, this is my work laptop.  It's encrypted.  Now all those pictures you put on there are encrypted.  You'll probably never get them off of here now."  And then the tantrum ensued.  Luckily, Todd managed to unencrypt them, but I still haven't had a moment to get them off of his laptop and onto mine.

You see, my own laptop has been slower than weight loss.  I've complained about it, ad nauseum.  I've started negotiations for a new one "If you get me a new laptop, I will never ever ever pester you about leaving your dirty clothes in the living room ever again.  For the rest of our marriage."  The offer piqued his interest, but we've been too busy to pick a new one out.

"Ah, you don't need a new laptop.  Yours is riddled with viruses.  Let me take this into the office and get it cleaned up for you," he offered.

"What do you mean 'riddled with viruses'?  My manuscript is on there.  Man. U. Script."  Then hyperventilation ensued.  A lot of it.  A paper bag over my mouth may or may not have been involved.  I will neither confirm nor deny.

So, the laptop's in surgery.  I was supposed to go get it yesterday after work.  During lunch I ran some errands at the bank, got an oil change and the swung by the dive shop to pick up a tank that had been serviced.  I said goodbye to Red, the owner of the shop, and inserted the key into the ignition.  When I turned it nothing happened.  The engine didn't roar to life, I didn't pull out of the shop and drive back to the office.  Nothing. 

I got my jumpers out and went back into the shop and held them up as Red was on the phone.  He winced then followed me out.  We clamped the cables on.  I turned the key.  Nada.  I glanced at my watch.  I should have been sitting at my desk for a good 10 minutes by that point.

Phoned AAA.  Roadside assistance dude came out but was able to provide no such assistance despite the fact that I was near the road.  I turned the key while he hit various parts of my engine with a stick.  I didn't think that method would have worked anyway, but kept my mouth shut.

Three hours later the tow truck arrived.  The driver hit the engine with a stick as well.  He turned the key and the engine roared to life in perhaps what would be the last time the starter on my car would ever work.  I drove home, pulled the car into the garage and now I wonder if I'll ever get it out again when Todd and I take it to the mechanic next week. 

I arrived home after 6 by that point, frustrated that I'd missed an entire afternoon of work.  I turned on the desktop computer that I rarely use and attempted to log in to work.  Access denied.  Tried again.  Access denied.  I swore.  I threatened.  I negotiated.  I used various phrases starting with the word "mother" until finally something went right and I got in.

I worked for a few hours and stumbled upon an email from the surgeon currently operating on my laptop.

"Hi Beej, hoped it would have been ready but there are about 6500 pieces of spyware on it.  It keeps blue screening, but I am still working on it."

"That's OK," I wrote back.  "It's not like I was going to get there anyway.  It would seem that my jeep has about 6500 pieces of spyware on it and the starter blue screened today."

But today is another day, and I am determined for it to go better.  It'll start with taking Todd's car to work instead. 

Ausable Chasm

I never knew this place existed. I never would have even thought about it. But just west of Plattsburgh is a mini Grand Canyon called Ausable Chasm.

The Ausable River carved its way through the sandstone over the years until it created a chasm filled with fascinating rock formations at every turn. We hiked along the rim of the canyon with some leather clad biker dudes who had ridden in from Mississippi, Cincinnati and further west in New York state. We asked them about riding all that way, and they asked us about sailing all that way. Such different modes of transport, yet there we were all in the same place.

Then we had the choice of following the trail to the bottom of the chasm, or staying along the top. We debated the pros and cons of each way.

“Well, when we go tubing in the river we’ll see it from the bottom anyway,” I reasoned.

“Yeah, but from the top it’s just the same damn thing,” Todd countered. “At least with the trail on the bottom we’ll get close to the rocks and really experience the chasm.” The biker dudes agreed and we all descended the staircase, marveling at the towering walls of sandstone over us at every angle.

We followed the trail until we arrived at the line for the tube or raft rides. We had bought passes to tube the river and joined the end of the line. Luckily there were more tubes than rafts, and more people waiting to ride a raft than a tube, so we were able to bypass most of the line. We stood at the bottom of the chasm and waited for our turn. We watched the chasm staff lower rafts with a crane from the rim to the very bottom just in front of where we stood.

I tucked my camera back into the dry bag I’d purchased in the gift shop. The guide dropped the tube into the water and instructed me to walk down the steps and flop my ass into the center of the donut. The cold water splashed me and goosebumps instantly formed on my arms and legs. Todd flopped into his tube and the gentle current took us downstream.

The walls created an optical illusion. The layers of rock traveled slightly upward, giving the impression that the water would flow downhill, however the water was largely stagnant. We went through a small rapid, the left channel was decidedly narrower than the right. Of course, I was pulled into the narrower side, and eventually got stuck where the channel was smaller than my tube. I edged my way through the pass while Todd sailed by me on the wider stream, laughing all the way.

Once we turned the corner we waited for the guided rafts to pass out of sight. We jumped off our tubes and dunked into the water, thus breaking the rules we’d read when we signed up for this little adventure.  The cold water swirled around me and I dunked my head after Todd had said "Come on, you have to dunk your head.  When are you going to get the chance to do this again?" We climbed back in just before another guided tour came through. “Breakin’ the law! Breakin’ the law!” I sang to Todd as he giggled. 

We went through the larger rapid, and I squealed like a little girl the whole way through. Then we gently flowed on near still water to the end. We climbed out, boarded the bus, and caught glimpses of the chasm through the trees.

From the Back Seat

The thing about traveling by sailboat is that once you get somewhere, like a town, you don’t have a way to explore easily. There’s always going by foot, which is great because we don’t get too much exercise sitting on our butts on a sailboat anyway. At one point we bought some foldable motor scooters, but we never really managed to get them to work right. (Secretly, I knew they’d be more of a pain in the ass than they were worth. Now they are sitting against the wall on my side of the garage at home.) We’ve rented a moped in the past, just so we could cover more miles when we got to port, but no matter where we go there’s usually a taxi.

There was the time in Newport when we felt like dorks taking a taxi to the Walmart. But overall we find them handy. For a few bucks we can go to the supermarket and stock up on provisions. For a few bucks we can go just about anywhere and learn something about the local area from a local character. (There was the time we got a ride with a cabbie who was also a rabbi AND a minister. Figure that one out. If you can, let me know because I still haven’t. I think his business card said something to the effect of “Rabbi John Smith, Baptist Minister. “ What?)

On Tuesday night we took a cab around Plattsburgh just to check things out. Our cabbie was a bit of a dud. We like to get restaurant recommendations from cabbies, because they are always in the know about those sorts of things. We’ve eaten in really terrific restaurants that we never would have found otherwise. The Tuesday night dude said that he typically eats fast food because it’s cheaper. Then he pointed out the McDonald’s with the lake view from the back parking lot. We ended up eating dinner at Irises, which was wonderful.

The driver that took us to Ausable Chasm on Wednesday was a bit better, because he knew the local area. He told us about the history, and the fear the locals felt at the start of the Gulf War in 1991 when, seemingly, hundreds of jets deployed from the now defunct Plattsburgh Air Force Base. I could imagine it as we drove by the base.

The one we had on the way back from the chasm was fabulous. He was originally from Burlington, and he talked about local restaurants as if he were a human Zagat guide. We ended up at the local Mexican joint anyway, but knew it would be good because he’d said so.

Damaged Goods

It was going well. We left Burlington and were headed west to cross the lake and end up in Plattsburgh. I took the wheel, the wind was coming from behind. To stay on course I needed to keep the boat dead north, and Todd had warned me not to stray further than 10 degrees.

I meticulously watched the compass in the GPS, our bearing hovered at 2 degrees, right on target. And then I, stupidly, blinked my eyes. And then the compass read 30 degrees. And then Todd said “Holy shit! Thirty degrees?” And then he said, "Look out!" The mainsail jibed—rapidly changing from the right side of the boat to the left. It’s the kind of thing you see in movies, when the sail goes flying across the deck and the character gets smacked with the boom and goes flying overboard. It happens that quickly

I didn’t get hit with the boom. I got hit with the main sheet, the rope that attaches the boom to the boat at the very tail end of the boom. It’s this rope that controls how far out the main sail will be. The rope, coiled around pulleys on the boom and where it attaches to the boat, was pulled taut. The coiled rope struck me on the right side of my back as I tried to dive out of the way. The force of the boom sweeping across the boat caused the rope to shove me hard onto my left side where I smacked my hip on the edge of the wall in the cockpit. I crawled out of the way, but it didn’t really matter. I’d already been hit, the wind knocked out of me I struggled for a breath while tears flowed down my cheeks. The pain stretched across my back and centered on my left hip.

I remained at the wheel for the remainder of the ride to Plattsburgh. I pressed my body against the steering wheel to give the main sheet ample room to move around behind me. I flinched at every noise. The bruise forming on my hip could not sustain the weight of my loose cotton shorts; I unbuttoned and unzipped to alleviate the pressure.

We arrived in Plattsburgh and created our own mooring. There was the weight below the water and a buoy on the surface, but nothing to tie our boat to. I leapt into the dinghy with ropes and shackles in hand while Todd circled Sabine in a holding pattern in the mooring field until I was ready to tie on. I clipped on the shackles, I waved him over, I grabbed her bow and expertly slipped the mooring lines to the post, momentarily forgetting about the pain in my back.

Back on the boat, Todd inspected my bruise which had formed into an ugly purple splotch just below where my bathing suit bottom would sit. I felt it throb as the blood rushed into that spot and wondered how I’d sleep that night. He walked, I hobbled, in to explore Plattsburgh for dinner.

Plattsburgh is the former site of a large and active air force base. The city itself is small, and I am sure it struggled with the closing of the base. We roamed the streets and I tried to picture how it would have looked with uniformed airmen ducking in and out of storefronts. And I wonder where all those airmen went after the base closed. My fifth grade best friend had moved to Plattsburgh at the end of the school year because her father, also in the Air Force, had been assigned there. I tried to imagine her walking around Plattsburgh as well, and wonder whatever happened to her. (I see a Google stalking session in my future.)

We made plans to explore the local area more the next day, with a trip to Ausable Chasm as we ate dinner at a sidewalk café. I slouched in my seat to keep the pressure off the bruise.

It's Going By Too Damn Fast

It's already Wednesday night, and this week in the northern part of Lake Champlain is going by way too fast. Right now we're in Plattsburgh, NY, some 20-30 miles from the Canadian border. So far I've managed to jibe the boat and end up up with a bruise the size of my fist right where my ass meets my left hip. But I've also explored some places I've never been before, and thoroughly enjoyed those places so long as nobody touches my left butt cheek. But let's go back to Friday night so I can get you guys all caught up.

First there were 150 pears. On Tuesday night we checked on the pear trees and decided we needed to harvest before leaving on the trip. And we couldn't just pick all those pears and not do something with them because then we'd come home to 150 rotten pears that we may as well have just left on the tree. We put the coffee table up on the dining room table and placed the pears up there to ripen out of the reach of prying snouts. Nemo especially loves the fruit trees on our property, it's a smorgasbord of apples, pears, blueberries and peaches that occasionally fall to the ground. A trip out to do his business ends up in an unexpected snack. What's better than that? Let me tell you, there's nothing better than an unexpected snack. I should know. It's the promise of an unexpected snack that keeps me returning home when Todd's there. And he uses this to his advantage all the time.

We brewed up two batches of pear ginger jam on Friday night. Todd's a jam-master. Not the rapper DJ kind, but he rocks the Ball jars. I ground up the pears using the fruit-basherator attachment for our Bitchen-aid mixer. Todd boiled the jars, peeled some fresh ginger... then about 2 hours later we had 24 jars of jam.

Saturday morning we made two more batches, cleaned out and packed the truck and drove a leisurely ride to Rutland, VT. We spent the night at Todd's parents house while they were attending a high school reunion in Albany and we had the joint to ourselves. Let me tell you, it's pretty weird to be walking around naked in my in-laws house, but whatev.

Sunday morning we headed to the Rutland Airport, which is basically a shoebox with planes parked behind it, and picked up a rental car. The plan was to leave our truck at Chipman Point, then drive the rental to Burlington. So far we've spent God knows how much money on one way car rentals, and snuck the dogs into 3 out of the 4 rentals. (Just so you know, an old fitted bedsheet works wonders at keeping the dog hair off the upholstery.)

We arrived in Burlington and met up with Todd's old friend Brian for the sail from Shelburne (where we'd left the boat) to Burlington. Brian good naturedly helped Todd fix our carelessness with the dinghy. We'd forgotten to close the air vent on the dinghy's gas tank. The bottom of the dinghy filled with rain water, which then caused the tank to float and flip over to fill the tank with water and the bottom of the boat with gasoline. But when 2 badass Eagle Scouts put their heads together....

Blur... sail to Burlington, grab a mooring, head in to shore, drink lots of margs, eat enchiladas, then meet up with my old friend Laura. I haven't seen Laura since the night before she left our dorm in Australia. She was another American student living at Dunmore Lang College. She only did 1 semester in Oz, while I did the full year.

Laura came walking up to meet us at the Echo Center in Burlington. She looks exactly the same... her beautiful blonde curly hair, her cheerful voice, her boisterous laugh. It brought me back to when we were 20 and exploring our lives on campus just outside of Sydney. It's amazing how much can change in 16 years. We're both married. She has 5 year old twins. And the time I spent with her was way too short.

Monday morning we bombed around in Burlington, and then Tuesday was the trip across the lake and north to Plattsburgh. I learned a very important lesson about sailing with the wind from behind en route to Plattsburgh and how precarious that can be. Until I tell you about that, I'll be sitting on my right butt cheek.

Solo Dive

I've never been diving alone. The thought of it scares the crap out of me. There are way too many things that can go wrong. What if I get stuck in some abandoned fishing line and can't untangle myself? This is a common concern among New England divers. It's for this reason I impersonate a Bond girl and keep a knife strapped to my leg. (I also use the knife as a way to get Todd's attention. No, not that way. I unsheathe it and clang it against my tank until he gets the message. He loves that I do that, by the way. (not))

Laat Sunday morning we took the Under Achiever to the northern side of Prudence Island. Our friends Sean and Heidi were with us, and the mission was to collect as many quahogs as possible for the party with the Ya Yas that night. We armed ourselves with catch bags, Sean and Heidi rolled off the boat first. I rolled off next and waited for Todd to gear up.

"Beej, just go down. It's not like we'll stay together anyway. When we're digging for clams we'll kick up too much silt anyway. Just go down."

After asking him "Are you sure?" about 15 times he said "Yes. We're only in 10 feet of water anyway. It's not that big of a deal."

And it wasn't. But it was at first. I descended alone, and the viz sucked. I couldn't see a damn thing and smacked into the ocean floor.  You know, that big thing on the bottom of the ocean?  I didn't see it until I was in it. I swam into the current, so that on my way back to the boat I could ride the current and not be too tired to get back, with a catch bag full of clams.

I plunged my fingers into the mud in search of clams, then looked over my shoulder. Todd wasn't at arm's length away, and the butterflies awoke in my stomach. I sucked on my regulator a bit harder and tried to calm myself down. The depth gauge read 11 feet. I took a fix on my compass, and told myself "Just get some clams and get it over with."

I reached down and felt my first clam.  I pulled on it, and it wouldn't come free.  Then I pulled on it again.  I swam closer to it to get better leverage on it.  I yanked and it still wouldn't budge.  Then I noticed a dark blotch in front of me.  Holding the clam, I swam toward the blotch.  The blotch actually was Heidi.  The clam was in her catch bag.  I dropped the clam, hoping she wouldn't notice that I tried to steal it, and waved. 

After about 10 minutes I thought to myself, "Now where the hell am I?"  I'd been following a compass bearing to the southeast, but I couldn't tell where I was.  I popped up from 9 feet to see.  I saw the boat anchored not too far away, but didn't see Todd anymore.  I scanned the surface for bubbles, but couldn't see any through the waves.  I shrugged and descended again.  Hadn't found any clams yet that weren't already spoken for.  I plunged my hands into the mud again and felt something hard.

The clam was so big that I could barely Fit my hand around it.  It was firmly wedged into the mud, I pulled harder.  My legs flew up behind me, too buoyant.  I had set up my tank too high, so my head kept bonking on the tank valve and my legs flew up behind me.  This would prove to be a nuisance every time I tried to pull a clam out of the mud.  With every clam I found I would hold onto it with my fingertips as my legs flung themselves upward until I was completely inverted with every clam I caught.

I also learned on this solo dive that when you're digging around in the mud you can't see a damn thing.  I had to hold every hard object found in the mud up to my face to inspect it.  At one point I even learned that crabs don't like it when you yank them off the ground to look at them.  I felt the claw pinch my thumb.  I frantically shook my right hand to free it and watched it fly off ass over teakettle back into the cloud of silt around me.

I looked down at my air gauge and saw I was down to 800.  Time to surface.  I popped up, took a compass bearing and went back down, figuring I could catch more clams on the swim back.  A few minutes later I popped up again and heard Todd say "There she is!"  He jumped in a nd swam back to the boat with me.

He pulled my catch bag onto the boat and inspected it, "This is only half full.  You were down there for an hour and this is all you got?"

Sean looked in as well, "But they're fricken huge!"  Then I looked down and saw the mountains of clams that everyone else caught.  We robbed the ocean of 400 some-odd clams.

Squirrel du Soleil

Where there's a will... there's a way.

The Last Full Day

“And what are we going to do today?” was the question that hung in the cockpit on Thursday morning. Burlington had been “done” the day before. We got into town just in time for lunch, and then what?

The only logical answer to that question was to rent electric bikes. We arrived at the bike rental place while the bike rental guy showed us the bikes. They looked like ordinary bikes, but they had a battery pack under the seat and an electric motor on the sprocket of the back wheel. When you pedal a sensor picks up that your feet are cycling around and sends juice to the motor on the back wheel. You get something like three times the energy from one cycle around on the pedals. And then there’s the throttle handle in case you don’t feel like pedaling.

OK, electric bikes? Wicked cool.

Once back at the boat we untied from the mooring and threw up the sails. Because we could, as the masts and sails were back on. As the sun threatened to set, we sailed west right into it toward New York. The wind was perfect across the beam (perpendicular to the boat) right where Sabine likes it. If she was an actual woman, she’d turn toward it, a contented smile would cross her face and she’d arch her back and sweep her hair off her neck to feel the breeze cool her skin. She kinda did that. She tipped slightly in the opposite direction and silently flowed through the lake.

It was with that sail that we’d traveled more than 500 miles since leaving East Greenwich on July 3.

The next morning we sailed to Shelburne Shipyard, where we’d leave Sabine until getting back the week of August 16th. She’d been taking on more water than we’d like since the great rope mishap at Chipman Point a few days before. Apparently my carelessness with that rope, and it’s wrapping in the prop, caused the prop shaft to fall out of alignment.

Luckily there is a Yanmar mechanic at Shelburne, so he can suss out what is wrong with Sabine’s diesel and fix it before we’re due back. A phone call after we’d left her there revealed that the water leaks in the engine room caused the pulleys on the belt system on the diesel also engine mounts to rust to the point where they are no longer even a little bit viable. Long story short, wrapping the line around that prop could have knocked the diesel off its mounts and render it entirely useless. So, in a way it was a good (but very costly) thing that I’d wrapped that line and misaligned the prop shaft—else we’d never known about the rusted out engine mounts.

Friday we rented a car, piled the dogs, bags, kids and us into it and drove to Massachusetts to meet my brother and sister-in-law to give them back their children. Then the long and tired ride back to Rhode Island.

But the adventure resumes in a few short days.