Taurus Great Loop

Fred and I made the trip to Animal Kingdom in Orlando. It’s the newest Disney theme park. We had an hour and twenty-minute drive that turned into an hour and 45 minutes drive with traffic and accidents.  Discovery Island is the middle of the park and the large “banyan”  tree is the symbol of Animal Kingdom. Next we visited Africa to see the live jungle animals We stopped for a break and had Mickey pretzels! Then we went on the Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail and it did not disappoint. Interestingly, we walked more than five miles for our time in the park. Then we went to our late lunch (2:15), where we had whole fried sustainable fish (striped bass).  A pparently, some people finish the meat on the fish, and then the fish head sings opera, or quotes Shakespeare. 😂  Lion King dessert. And don’t worry, we shared both of them.  And we saw a rainbow on our one hour and twenty minute drive home!

Melbourne, Florida is about an hour south of Cape Canaveral. One of the more interesting things to do here is watch a rocket space launch.  After we returned from our trip home for the holidays, both our son and the Melbourne harbor host for AGLCA, told us about this past week’s upcoming launches. We now know the website for all Cape Canaveral space launches - and I will share it with you:   Cape Canaveral Space Launch Schedule The two launches we have seen were Space X launches, one at 2pm and the other at 9pm.  For the first one, we drove an hour to the outskirts of Titusville, the closest that the general public can get to Cape Canaveral. As we were driving north on Route 1, we came to a small grass area just on the side of the road with several cars parked there. It’s where locals go to watch.  SpaceX daytime launch By the time of the launch, so many cars and people were there that it disrupted traffic. But a police officer drove by and didn’t do anything, so I g...

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing FaceBook and saw a posting asking if there were any Loopers wintering in the Melbourne area who would be willing to come to their January or February meeting to talk about their adventures. Yep! That’s us!  It was posted by the Banana River Sailing and Power Squadron.  Fred agreed, so I responded to the posting. The end result is that we went to their meeting last night. Fred had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that I edited. There were only 10 people there, but two of them had heard of us coming and came specifically to hear what we had to say.  Unknowingly, we went over the time and no one said anything, nor did anyone leave. It was a conversational presentation where they asked questions as we went.  And everyone had questions. It was amazing. Fred and I were very pleased at how well it went. 

We drove 2.5 hrs to Fort Lauderdale to take the engine exhaust elbows from our boat engines to have new ones made. The exhaust elbow in the port engine was corroded and leaking exhaust into the engine room. Which may also explain the CO detectors going off in our bedroom right next to it.  You can see the black soot from the leakage where the piece at the end of the black hose meets the white piece. The exhaust elbows are made of cast iron, so are quite heavy. The new ones will be stainless steel. And quite pricey.  Since we were in Fort Lauderdale, we decided to have lunch on the beach.  We found an amazing sushi restaurant:

Happy New Year!  We had a wonderful visit with our daughter’s family in Connecticut.  We flew Delta to Atlanta, then picked up a flight to Connecticut. We took a 7:00 pm flight because we thought we might need an extra day on the boat for weather issues. All was well until my bag didn’t arrive. It was midnight and we didn’t get home until 1:30 am. 😔  And yes, I finally got my bag at 5:00 pm the next day.  Christmas was great!  The grandchildren are the perfect ages:  7, 5, and 2.  We planned to return to the boat on the auto-train. We had looked into renting a car in Melbourne, but it was $5,000!!  So on Wednesday, January 5, we set out to drive the 7 hours to Washington, DC to catch the auto-train by 2:30 pm. But about 40 min after leaving home we were on the interstate still in Connecticut. It started to be freezing rain. Apparently there was a multi car pileup ahead of us. We all stopped and had to wait 4 HOURS for it to be cleared. We had lef...