Home again

Our trip on the Grande Caribe with Blount Small Ship Adventures was terrific. There were 63 passengers on this trip, and it was a varied and congenial group. We boarded in New Orleans and headed to Nashville. The itinerary went through the Intracoastal Waterway, Mobile Bay, the Mobile, Alabama, Black Warrior, and Tombigbee Rivers, then into the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. The Tenn-Tom ends at the Tennessee River where MS, AL, and TN come together. The route went down the Tennessee to the Barkley Canal across the Land Between the Lakes to the Cumberland River. We went up the Cumberland to our destination in Nashville.

There were a number of stops (Mobile, Demopolis, AL, Columbus, MS, Shiloh Military Battlefield, Eddyville, KY, and Clarksville, TN, with optional tours or walk around time. Our on-board expert was a recently retired superintendent at Shiloh and long-time park ranger. He and his wife had completed a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail last year, and their story of that accomplishment was special.

The cabins on this small ship were, as you might expect, very small, but comfortable. And, of course, we didn’t expect to spend time in our cabins in any case. The food was exceptional. The sous-chef was the baker, and she made the bread for all our meals - to say nothing of the cookies and sweet rolls and scones for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. Yum!

We got home about noon. John got the car unloaded, I got the bags unpacked and stuff ready for the laundry and/or put away, and even got in a quick trip to the grocery store. Then a bit of lunch and plowed through the mail - at least most of it went in the recycle bin. John took a nap and then went to get his boat ready for his first row of the season in the morning (hopefully). I got the two papers looked at (I had it restarted yesterday so we'd have the TV section for the week), and spent most of the rest of the day getting caught with computer stuff. The boat had a wifi router which worked well, but lots of times, there was no signal in range for the router to pick up. Sometimes, we didn’t even have cell phone service. We all survived. I even got a couple of new games to play on my iPad from one of the other passengers.

We got some good photos, and I’ll be sharing them. But today I want to put up a great picture of Jesse and Maddy. It’s wonderful just because it is, but it’s almost identical to a picture I took about 22 or so years ago of Jesse’s dad and brother.