Kathy and I have closed and sold the Richmond House. It was an insane time. We hired movers to move us. They took the furniture, but left tons of stuff behind. Hunter took some of it. Trey came over, high graded what was left and stuffed it in the Mustang.
It is very hard to move cars and boats. You can move a car. You can move a car fairly reasonably. You can move a boat, though it is harder than a car. But it is hard to move both a car and a boat with one moving company; we could not find one that would.
We were ten days from closing and still did not have a solution and I was at the weakest point in my life since I collapsed in my crib at 18 months with polio. My plan B was just put them in storage till we could figure out a solution.
Enter the SANS AV team. They prayed for us, they, Will, in particular, brainstormed for us. Going to skip the details, but the plan was get a hitch for the Mustang and tow the boat. Several people volunteered to do the drive, because right then I physically could not do it.
Long story short, Will from the AV team, got the nod. We got him a train ticket from Washington to Richmond, he took a cab to the house and with help from Trey and Hunter, got the boat loaded up and took off.
I will pass on the details, suffice to say Will made it over the rockies in the face of a massive snowstorm with a trailer. He is also a professional trucker, meaning he has a lot of experience pulling trailers of every sort.
What a glorious day when he pulled up about noon on Christmas eve. He ended up missing his original flight, but Kathy had already calculated he could not make it and called United and set him up for a flight on Christmas day.
While he was here I tried to show hospitality. Cooking for the SANS AV team is a bit challenging, imagine trying to cook jerk chicken for someone from Jamaica, or in Will's case meals for someone who is from New Orleans, I understand they have a couple decent restaurants there *grin*. But I did my best.
Now, we have to take all this work on the Virginia side apart here in Washington. The first step was to get the ropes off the boat trailer and empty it. The knots had been through the storm and they were hard to untie. Fortunately I still have my marlinspike and that made short work of the problem. I got the sails, mast, oars and sliding seats out of the boat and stacked them under the trailer. I started to unload the Mustang, Trey did an incredible job of packing the boat. I decided to finish on Christmas day. First, we made breakfast, then we dropped Will off at SEATAC airport. Then we headed back home, and took on the Mustang.
We aren't totally finished. There was some glass damage. We swept and shop vacuumed to remove the glass from the car. Tomorrow, I will call the local Ford dealer and see if they can help. If not, I suppose we can find a specialty glass shop of some sort.
The bottom line is I am deeply grateful that my teammates made the impossible or at least the very difficult to happen. I am really looking forward to warmer weather and being able to play with this craft on the lake. There are still problems to overcome, how to store the boat in the summer season, do I moor it or shore storage. However, last summer every time I saw a convertible drive on a gorgeous Pacific Northwest day, I felt a twinge, I wanted to drive my pony car. Starting to look like I will get a chance.
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