It's back to school for Allison, and coordinating preparations for the boat's trip south this autumn. We had a visitor during the second week of September, as Karyn's Dad came to visit for a week from Wisconsin. Ally graciously gave him her cabin for the week, and tucked up into the pilothouse for the duration. I made up the PH settee into a double bed, and made it as cozy as possible for her; she loved it and it all worked out quite nicely.
Dad fit right in, and we didn't alter our basic daily routine of getting Ally off to school, Ron off to work, then my doing boat maintenance & cleaning during the day. In the evenings, we either feasted aboard and followed dinner with a movie, or went out to eat. On Sept 10th, we showed him the town, via an evening dinghy cruise to the Inner Harbor for Ron's birthday dinner at Ruth's Chris' Steakhouse at Pier V. At 82, Dad is pretty agile, and got in and out of the dinghy with greater aplomb than I anticipated. We had our boat neighbors, the Medicos off Medici over for dinner on Friday night, another feast with friends!
The only drawback during Dad's stay was that the weather didn't really cooperate during most of the week, being rainy or cloudy. Plus, the entertainment system on the boat had developed some glitches (Ally's and our cabin TVs were stuck on different channels and would not reset.) that were annoying.
While all eyes were glued to the Weather Channel for news of Hurricane Ike, we were then took Equinox down the Bay for a cruise to Annapolis for the weekend. We had glorious weekend weather, with more dinghy cruising up Ego Alley, around the Naval Academy, then over to dinner at O'Leary's for another night out.