What a month we are having. Tall ships, County Fair, First Place Blue Ribbon, Published in a book, 39th Wedding Anniversary, Got Out In Our Boat Again.  The only thing missing from this picture is camping.  HMmmmmmmmmmm!!!  Maybe it is time to plan for at least an overnight camping trip to one of our local beaches.  What do you think?

Speaking of fun, look at these garden eels we saw at the aquarium. They slip up and down in the sand as if they were greased.  They are about as round as a pencil and probably about as long, but since they stay down in the sand we never got to see their tail end.  Each one goes up high in the air and if a bigger fish passes to close they quickly slip down into the sand only to pop back up

On top of all of that over the past month and half or so we have made great big dents in our mountains of boxes.  I thought they were an insurmountable task and all they took was work.  We still have tons of boxes, but they don’t seem so terrible any longer.

As you know all of what we are doing is part of getting ready to go full timing.  Each thing we do for recreation and each thing we do for work leads us down a path.  Some paths are easy and others are dark and scary.  Each path leads to a place we want to go, “full-timing”  It is often difficult going, but we are making steady progress.  How about you are you making progress to a goal in your life?  I sure hope so.  It would be good to know that others are succeeding along with us.  Maybe not at the same things, but at least motivated by our success to create your own success in things that are important to you. 

Hopefully this week I will buy the brake pads for the Bounder rear brakes and get that job completed. I am guessing that at a slow careful pace it will take about 3–4 hours to complete.  Did you read where I got quotes from $800 to $1200 to do my brakes?  Doing it myself means it will cost under $100.  OH, ad $65 to that because I had a mechanic flush my brake lines instead of doing it myself.

Yesterday we stopped at a new strip mall in town for the grand opening of a hardware store.  Nice store, but we didn’t buy anything.  When you are thinking of down sizing to go full time, it doesn’t make sense to buy to much.  HOWEVER, we went to the new boating supply store a couple doors down and found just what we had been looking for.  We found swivel bases and cushioned seats for our Porta-Bote.  Now we have to make plans very soon to try them out.  The plastic bench seats in the Bote are not that comfortable even with stadium seats with backs.  I think these new seat will make boating a lot more enjoyable. 

I am still thinking about the best way to transport the Porta-Bote and motor when we use the Nissan Frontier truck as our towed vehicle behind the Bounder.  I have the rack already installed I just haven’t spent the time to figure out the attachments.  Right now we just put the Bote in our van when we want to use it.  It fits our cargo van about 6 inches to spare. The boat is 12 feet long.