A summary of our May adventures, including our 5th anniversary, Mothers Day with Kyle’s mom, musings on air conditioning, celebrity bartending, and a visit to Kyle’s dad’s marina.

First Friday, we did our normal thing and went downtown for Art Walk. I managed to find a street kitty to pet, so the evening was a success. Obviously the cat preferred Kyle.

The following day, we packed up the bus and drove out to Folly Beach County Park for our annual anniversary photos. I think these are getting earlier every year because May is the month the weather starts to become unbearably warm.

After the beach, we drove to an abandoned strip mall for some graffiti photos. This ended up being one of the most interesting spots we’ve ever gone to for anniversary photos.

Lastly, we haven’t taken any anniversary photos at a brewery yet so we popped over to our favorite spot – Pawley’s Island Brewing – for a lunch beer. We were only there for about ten minutes before I changed out of the dress, the summer heat is starting!

The following weekend, I worked from home on Friday, while Kyle went to the airport to pick up his mom for a Mothers Day visit! We spent a relaxing day onboard since I was tethered to my laptop.

Saturday was the complete opposite. We made our way to Drayton Hall Plantation, where we did a house tour and then walked the grounds. In the midst of a Drayton wanderings, our friends were making plans for a cookout that night so after Drayton we stopped at Costco to grab some food and beer to bring along.

That delayed us enough to the point where we thought we might not be able to get a table at Fleet Landing, since they stop seating at 3.30 and there was a 45 minute wait. However, we made good time there, the wait was much shorter when we arrived, and we were seated by 2.30. Kyle’s poor mom, our first meal of the day was at 3pm, but the food was so delicious it was worth the wait. After that huge meal, we took a quick walk to the pineapple fountain, then back to the boat to prepare for the evening festivities (and by that I definitely mean we all passed out for a nap).

I’ve been feeling really isolated from our friends lately, so a cookout was exactly what I needed. One couple in our group of friends had just moved out of state. The cookouts hosts announced that they now had firm plans to move to Seattle now. With Kyle and me leaving this fall, our group of friends is quickly contracting!

I woke up on Sunday feeling like I’d been hit by a bus (a long day out in the sun, combined with staying up late), so when Kyle and Kim wanted to take the kayaks out I decided to stay onboard and have a lazy morning. When they got back, Kyle cooked up an amazing Mother’s Day brunch.

We strongly debated going for a boat ride, but the weather was essentially identical to our Christmas outing that ended in a hard collision with the dock. We had a hard, but productive discussion and decided that it would be foolish to force ourselves to dock the boat in rough conditions before even learning how to properly dock in easy conditions. That being said, we also agreed that we can’t wait until we have another visitor before talking about taking the boat out, we need to start practicing now. And we need to get the anemometer fixed, I really want to know what the wind speed is when we’re considering our options.

Even though we weren’t taking our boat out, we still wanted to get out on the water so we chose to do a Harbor Tour (which we do for free with our passes). After registering for the tour, we had plenty of time to kill so we went to the aquarium (which is also free with our passes). We showed up just in time to sign up for a behind-the-scenes tour of the big ocean tank, which is easily one of the coolest things we’ve done at the aquarium.

After that, harbor tour! This was our first time going out with this tour company (our normal harbor tour was only doing Mother’s Day tours), and we found it to be far superior to the other tour. It was much longer, took a slightly different route, and the captain was actually pretty funny. He took us under the Ravenel Bridge just so he could blow the horn and listen to the echo. He did it a second time and the cars on the bridge responded by honking their horns!

We stopped at two new breweries. Then, back to the boat for homemade tacos from scratch, the perfect way to cap off a full weekend! Kyle’s mom flew home early on Monday.

Our actual anniversary was mid-month, we celebrated on a Wednesday because that’s the day we could get cheap matinee tickets for Infinity War – neither of us could remember the last movie we saw at the theater. There’s an Olive Garden close to the theater, and I’ve been carrying around an OG gift card for multiple years so we decided to take advantage of that too. Between the ending of IW, the terrible service at OG, and the fact that OG basically feels like fast food since you can do everything yourself through the little kiosk screens at every table…well, it still wasn’t as bad as our first anniversary! I sound like I’m complaining, but the whole thing was pretty funny. And we both know how insanely lucky we are to have found a partner crazy enough to support the unconventional life that we’ve been working towards. We tried to think of our favorite moments in the last five years, but truly, we agreed that it’s the daily shared moments that we really love (although buying a boat made the list for both of us).

The AC in the car has been on the fritz literally since I started this blog, so Kyle borrowed a friend’s driveway on Saturday to replace the condenser and recharge the system. When he came home he cleaned up the boat while I tackled all the mold that has been starting to grow again lately. Now that temps have started to climb and we’re trying to keep the boat cool, mold has started growing again.

Speaking of which, it’s pretty clear that our AC unit onboard can only keep the bedroom cold. That’s definitely the most important place to keep cool, but…I suspect summer is going to be as rough as winter. Maybe worse because the cold was much more temporary than the heat will be. Only one way to find out!

Since Kyle spent all day in our friend’s garage, we repaid them by having them over for dinner. It was a weird night, with warm temps but the high humidity and stiff breeze made it feel bone-chillingly cold. Dinner was great and it was excellent to hang out with Jim and Frances.

The freezer was starting to look like a snowbank, so on Sunday I defrosted it and reorganized it and thawed a couple mystery meats that I was sure we were going to dump, but they weren’t as bad as I thought so instead we’re eating crockpot carnitas for lunch this week.

While we were at work on Thursday, Kyle got a call requesting he celebrity bartend that night. On one hand, it’s kind of a pain because we go straight from work to the bar and then don’t get home until midnight. On the other hand, it’s free sour beer tastings and some fun money in Kyle’s pocket. We decided to do it. I brought my laptop and tried to get work done, but when some friends stopped in I gave up. It was a quiet night due to rainy weather, but there was plenty of delicious local beer to try. Kyle had scrounged up some food from his office and made us PB&Js before he left work so we had a really gourmet dinner to go with our craft sour beer. Really, one of the biggest changes we’ve made since starting boat life is how much planning and prepping we do – if we do anything after work we have to pack food and spare clothes and figure out anything else we might need. I haven’t worn a backpack this much since elementary school.

For Memorial Weekend we trekked up to NC to see the marina that Kyle’s dad is leasing. They just got licensed to serve alcohol so we helped break in the new tiki bar. There was some accidental frozen beer that we tried to help out with as well. Beer slushies, anyone?

We brought up a carful of laundry to do, because apparently we are college kids again. In return we helped out with marina projects. Kyle helped install a shade sail at the bar and we made umbrella anchors for the patio umbrellas.

The marina is on the smaller side, the entrance is around 5 ft deep so the boats tend to be day sailers and powerboats. It’s surrounded by cypress trees, which are beautiful but the cypress knees make the shore inhospitable.

Ken and Kelly took over the marina in February and they inherited a lot of old stock, so we mined through that looking for treasures. I grabbed an old boat cover that I might be able to refit into a dinghy cover and/or chaps, and Kyle found the exact boat wax he was looking for. The boatyard manager, MacMac, tested and approved the boat cover.

We’re hoping to move Hobbes up to the marina this fall to do some refit. The entrance is a little iffy in both depth and width, but I guess we’ll deal with that in the fall. It’s worth a little extra effort to have a dockside boatshop where we can get work done.