A summary of our September adventures, including doctor visits, a log cabin, a rat!?, hurricane Florence prep and evacuation, homemade fender covers for $6, a work camp (it’s better than it sounds), and WE START OUR FINAL COUNTDOWN.

As we wind down our working careers, we’re trying to take care of all the things that require the good insurance, so our days are peppered with dental appointments, optometrist appointments, and regular checkups. These have all been pretty mundane, except they are a big reminder that we are in the very final phases of our five-year plan, and about to start our next one!

We got a call this week from Quantum Sails saying that our sails are ready for pickup, but we haven’t been able to leave work early enough to pick them up yet.

For Labor Day Weekend we drove the bus up to North Carolina (Best Carolina) to visit with Kyle’s dad and step-mom. They own a log cabin there, and have a perfect yard for camping out. Kyle spent the weekend doing what Kyle does: tinkering with electronics (in this case, a drone controller).

There was also a successful drone rescue after one got caught in a tree.

On our way to NC we had driven right by a brewery – that almost never happens! Usually we have to hunt them down. On the way home we made sure to stop and check out Seminar Brewing, and they even let us take our picnic lunch inside.

They have a nice courtyard and we were going to picnic there but it was at least a hundred degrees outside.

Kyle’s dad is a diesel mechanic, and while talking to him we realized we hadn’t started the boat engines since…we had a bad experience in December 2017! The shame. So we both stressed about that on our way home from NC, and then fired them up as soon as we got back. They both purred like kittens. I love this boat.

The following weekend was our last First Friday! September is one of bigger FF events, which means more galleries are open and they’re serving more wine and food. I’m really going to miss this, it truly was the perfect date night for us. Frugal but fancy, active, fresh air, all different kinds of art, wine and hors d’oeuvres, and gorgeous downtown Charleston. And the occasional street kitty.

We had one weird incident, and I hesitate to even bring it up, but it was just so strange. The river we’re in has a swift current, but there’s an eddy at the end of the dock. I was in the cockpit and I saw something swirling in the eddy, but it wasn’t floating right. At first I thought it was a piece of wood but it looked almost alive. As I leaned in for a closer look I realized – it was a rat! Swimming for dear life. I felt bad for it, of course, but it was getting closer and closer to our transom and I certainly couldn’t let it aboard, nor could I let it onto the dock where it might climb onto our or a neighbor’s boat. Kyle grabbed a boat hook and sort of flung it back out into the current, and a few minutes later he said “I think the rat just got circle-of-lifed” and said that a couple of seagulls and a dolphin appeared to have maybe chomped the poor guy. Sorry, rat.

Hurricane Florence appeared on our horizon that weekend, so I researched all sorts of hurricane prep. One of the things I read is that your bows should face the open water, so we fired up the engines for the second time in a week and turned the boat around. We had stopped at a thrift store and picked up some XXL sweatpants and I made $6 worth of fender covers. If you want an overly detailed version of our experience with compulsory evacuation and the ever-changing path of Florence, you can read it all right here!

The short version is that the marina closed for a week, so we were forced off the boat and we stayed with a couple different friends, we’re so grateful for their generosity. An impending hurricane is stressful enough without surprise houseguests, but I hope we made it work without becoming a burden. Stressful, and boring. We watched a lot of Netflix and ate a lot of junk food. Fortunately for us, it was a non-event here in Charleston, but absolutely devastating for some areas of North and South Carolina. We lived in New Bern for a while so it is shocking to see how bad the flooding was there.

After spending a week on land, in the AC, we lost our sea legs and our tolerance for heat. I didn’t quite feel queasy, but I was definitely a little off.

With the hurricane on the horizon, we didn’t bother picking up the sails since we couldn’t put them up anyway. We finally got that done in the last week of the month.

In other truly mundane tasks, we sorted through all the paperwork that gets boxed up and moved from home to home without ever getting looked at, until finally it’s just one mystery box that might be really important but no one really knows and no one ever has the time to sort through. Tell me you have boxes like that. It can’t just be us. Anyway, we sorted those into three piles: scan and keep, scan and toss out, and toss out. Mental baggage: gone.

Next month we’re invited to a bus club wedding campout, and it’s hard to say who we love more, the bride or the groom! So when they asked if anyone could come out for a working weekend to clean up their new property in preparation for the wedding, we said absolutely! As we got closer to the weekend, we were both stressing HARD about all the stuff we have to do. I had just put in my notice at work so the number of days we have left in Charleston is dwindling. In order to get some of our own stuff done, we only camped one night, but we got a lot of work done while we were there.

Kyle installed a garage door and helped frame up the bathhouse, which will be used at future campouts.

I helped paint the garage, particularly the high altitude sections.

The couple loves bright colors, so after the base coat was on the garage we teamed up to add some personality to the place!

After that weekend we’ve really been in the final countdown. My last day of work is 10/2, so our timeline has pretty much been finalized, our finances are pretty much set in stone, and our to-do list is a mile long. We’ve been burning the candle at both ends trying to finish projects and socialize.