Over the past few weeks I have been cataloging the items on the boat that needed to be taken home and making a checklist of the items to bring back. I use the Google "Keep" app on my phone and just love its list capability. We were up rather late on Tuesday night and then up early on Wednesday pulling out and piling up all the things to be taken off the boat. The bulk of the inventory being comprised of enough laundry for four full loads of wash.
I pulled out all the towels, stripped the bed, and piled up all our used clothing and sorted it to run through the wash when we got home. Clark pulled out his broken fender board to bring home, so he could build a replacement. Also, we had a mound of used Canada and Michigan charts and waterway guidebooks that we pulled off the boat to make room for the next round of river charts and guidebooks.
We had reserved the rental car for 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, so at 9:30 we headed up to the marina office to find a way to get to the Enterprise Car Rental place. When we made our marina reservation a few weeks ago, we were told that either someone from the marina could run us over or we could take the courtesy car to get there. When we walked up to the office, however, the door was locked and no one was around to provide us with either means of transport.
As we stood there planning our next action, the owner of Plane to Sea came up to the office. He is a very friendly Texan on the Great Loop who introduced himself to us and asked if we were "loopers" - always a good way to get a conversation going when the answer is "yes". Pretty quickly we found out that he had come up to the office to get the courtesy car as he had put his name in for a reservation on the car for 10:00 a.m. Uh-oh! We told him we needed a ride to pick up the rental car, and he agreed to drive us there as it was on his way to wherever he needed to go. Phew!
The Enterprise Rental Car place is in an office inside a car dealership with no signs external to the building whatsoever that any of the four of us in the courtesy car could discern. (5 if you count the dog with us.) We knew it was at the car dealership, we just had to figure out where. I waited in the car while Clark inquired then he came back and got me once he found out where to go. The car dealership was quite large and the location of the car rental office was not apparent at all.
When we walked up to the desk to get the car, it was precisely 10:00 a.m. How's that for timing? A bit of paperwork and we were on our way. It took Clark three trips from the boat to the car using the hand carts provided by the marina to move all the stuff. The first trip was just laundry and unused bed linens I decided to remove from the boat. The second trip was the broken fender board and broken electronics as well as a bucket load of charts, and the last trip consisted of all the food I brought along for the ride. Except for things like ketchup, I cleaned out the boat fridge (not the freezer).
We left the marina at 12:30 CT / 1:30 ET. Google maps optimistically announced that we would be home in Rumson in 13.5 hours just around 2:00 a.m. We didn't believe that for one minute! Our plans consisted of 2 days of driving split approximately 50/50 in time. When I spoke with my sister on Monday to let her know we were getting ready to leave on our trip, she gave me the scoop on Route 80 through Pennsylvania. Basically facilities are extremely limited with both food and lodging being very hard to come by after crossing the Ohio-PA border.
With that sage advice, we decided we would stay the night in Ohio, and we just needed to figure out where. Using all the Google capabilities on the phone, I found us a family diner / restaurant for dinner near Akron and a Hampton's Inn in Youngstown, Ohio. Several hotels showed up in the same area for the same price. From reading the customer reviews it was easy to tell that even though they charged the same price, the quality of stay was significantly different. We were happy with our room accommodations for the night, and the hot breakfast we enjoyed this morning.
We departed the hotel just after 8:00 this morning and drove straight through to Rumson with only the occasional fuel / rest stop along the way. Using my food supplies I brought from the boat, I made sandwiches to eat along the way, so we didn't need to find a restaurant for lunch. After a long day in the car, we pulled into the driveway around 6:00. Not including the stop for dinner last night or the sleepover time at the hotel, the trip took us about 17 hours driving time to complete. My guess had been 16 hours.
We came home to a hot, empty house. We noticed as we got into New Jersey that the outside temperature read over 90 degrees. The highest we saw being 93. We left the air conditioning on in the house set to 82 when we left on our Great Loop trip, so we figured it would be hot but not unbearable. We found the house quite acceptable. Clark headed straight for the thermostat, however, to reset the temperature both upstairs and down to a more reasonable 78 degrees.
He also made a B-line to the refrigerator to get that going so I could put away the food I had brought with me from Illinois. Fortunately the hotel room included a refrigerator so I could refreeze my ice packs and keep my food cold during the night. I figured there was no harm in bringing it. If it didn't survive the trip it would go in the trash, but if I didn't bring it, it would definitely go in the trash. I had a fight with the freezer drawer as it refused to close. One of the racks got off the proper track. Once I figured that out we were in business.
We dragged all our junk in from the car, and pretty quickly I put my first load of wash in the machine, started it going, and went off the do more unpacking / putting away chores. A too short time later I realized that I could not hear the washer running. Thinking that time had passed more quickly than expected, I went to check on the washer and throw the load in the dryer only to find a stopped washing machine full of soapy water. It seems that while we were away, the washing machine decided to break down. Drat!
I told Dr. Clark the situation and he immediately came to check it out and find out what symptoms it exhibited. No spin capability! In fact I thought that it suffered from a lack of electricity because it was so dead, but Clark proved that it could agitate just not spin. Next thing I knew he was on the internet watching a YouTube video on how to repair the washer. With two tool boxes of tools and considerable thumping and banging, he pulled the cover off the switches and poked around for a while, then he asked me if I had a large paperclip which I found for him.
Clark inserted the paperclip in the machine as a stop-gap repair to the lid-closed sensor. Apparently the washing machine trigger mechanism is broken, so it thinks the lid is open, and for safety reasons refuses to operate with it that way. Clark used the paper clip to hold the sensor mechanism together. The solution was sufficient for me to complete my first load of wash and start a second one tonight.
Tomorrow he'll go to the parts store for a legitimate replacement part. Meanwhile he thinks it funny that I dragged our laundry across four states only to find the washer broken when we got here. Glad he thinks it is funny. Before we left I told him that if he wanted to do the wash in a laundromat in Illinois, he could be my guest! He didn't take me up on the suggestion. I wonder why! From my point of view, I had to drag the laundry off the boat to do it somewhere and that somewhere might as well be at home. Little did I know that the washer would fail on me!
"Fixing" the washer didn't take Clark long, but 8:00 was rapidly approaching, and we had no food in the house for dinner except for the cheese and crackers left over from the trip out from Illinois. I suggested we get pizza and tackle the grocery problem tomorrow. We got ourselves a good ole NJ pizza - none of this upside down Chicago pizza stuff with the sauce on top of the cheese! We also got our favorite toppings of eggplant and meatballs. No where on our trip have we found eggplant or meatballs in the topping selections lists. Whether it was because I was starving or because it was exceptional pizza, I'll never know why I enjoyed it so much.
After dinner Clark decided to take his car out for a spin to make sure it was in good shape for doing errands tomorrow. He happily went out to the car, was out in the garage for a while, and unhappily came back in and said, "the car battery is dead". He took a charger out there, was gone for a while, came back in and said, "Looks like that car's not going anywhere anytime soon. The hybrid battery acts like it's dead." That's a serious problem. Needless to say he didn't get to take the car for a spin, and it looks like we'll be sharing the rental car for errands tomorrow.
We didn't know what would be waiting for us in NJ, but we knew that we would find things that needed to be done when we got here. My mother always said, "things come in threes", so I'm wondering what else we're going to find wrong. If I count my battle with the freezer drawer, that's my three. If that wasn't good enough to qualify as something broken, there may still be something lurking in the house to surprise us, and we just need to find out what it is.
Tomorrow with a "fixed" washer or a fixed washer, I will complete my laundry then I'll go food shopping. My son, Chris, and his wife, Heather, are coming to visit from Connecticut for the weekend. We're celebrating Chris's birthday which was last weekend when we were still in Illinois. This weekend is the first time we get to see them since before we left on our trip, and the first time we get to see them since we learned early last month that they are expecting their first child in February. Clark and I are thrilled to have another granddaughter on the way!
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