A summary of our January adventures, including party lights, a campout with the VW bus club, and a legendary birthday bloody mary. 

When it warmed up last week, we turned the water pump back on and the water worked fine again. Something must have frozen in one of the lines upstream of the pump but as far as we can tell nothing burst, which is more than we can say for the marina. Kyle brought our laundry to the clubhouse only to find that the laundry facilities and bathrooms were unavailable due to a burst pipe. There are additional showers on shore, otherwise we’d be stuck with icy cold showers onboard. Our lives are just so glamorous right now!

Kyle needed a relaxing project to work on, which for him means tinkering with electricity. He took the battery powered lights that we used at our wedding reception and rewired them to be powered off of USB. Now every night we have a disco dance party with neon lighting. Seriously, it’s the little things that make me happy – it might get dark at 5pm but now that means it’s time to fire up Disco Inferno and get our dance on.

The pipes were fixed by mid-January, so I got laundry done, which is way more exciting than it sounds. I also paid for our next month’s rent, so we’ve secured our slip for a while longer, but word on the street is that we’re going to get kicked out in February. Several boats left this weekend, everyone is starting to head south, mostly to the Bahamas. It sucks watching everyone leave for tropical weather and sandy beaches when we still have to stay and go to work every day. Our time will come!

It’s hard to keep the boat clean, especially with this cold weather. Every weekend we empty some lockers, discover some crazy condensation, and spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning and drying that out. It’s a constant battle. It really feels like we’re spinning our wheels at this point, all our effort goes into maintaining with no time or energy for actual boat projects.

Long story short, nothing exciting happening here.

The last week of January has been fabulous. Weather-wise, things have been pretty nice except for one day when the wind was absolutely howling out of the south. That’s the side where we don’t have any protection, so between the bouncing and the noise, we didn’t sleep at all that night.

We made big birthday plans for Kyle on Saturday, and then the bus club announced an impromptu camping weekend. We decided to make it out at least for one night, so Friday we hightailed it out of work and drove out to the middle of nowhere for a gloriously peaceful night of camping. We camped at the workplace of one of the bus club members, so Friday night we even got a plant tour of a packaging company.

We managed to sneak in a couple more campfire hours on Saturday morning before we got back in the bus and made our way back to Charleston.

From there, I started on Kyle’s birthday treat: a bloody Mary piled high with garnishes. It was all he wanted for his birthday!

After serving his bloody Mary lunch, we headed out to meet some friends for a birthday brewery tour. Three breweries later, we headed back to the marina to get a fire going. Kyle grilled up the kabobs and we roasted marshmallows. Eventually our luck ran out and it started sprinkling so we packed things up and most people headed home. It was a fabulous night!

Sunday was mostly recovery. Someone, who may or may not have been hungover, accidentally turned off the fridge instead of the gas after cooking breakfast, so we decided to take that opportunity to defrost the freezers. The big freezer doesn’t seal well and ice builds up around the lid which stops it from sealing completely. Add that to the list of boat projects.

After the major snowstorm early in the month, we’re glad to put January in the rear view mirror. Every day brings us closer and closer to gorgeous spring weather!