The following is a travel journal of our great circle cruise that began on March 1, 2006 and will end ? Some of the journal has been posted to the MTOA listserve, but this is the entire chronicle to date.  A brief explanation of terms used may be in order. Charles belongs to several boating lists and to simplify things I have nicknames for them so that I don’t have to pronounce the whole name and those are as follows:

Year 2 of the great adventure has officially begun because we're back on the boat. We arrived in Baltimore on Tuesday April 16, 2007.

The boat was "on the hard" and the guy who owns the marina was nice enough to let us stay on board, saving us money and the aggravation of driving back & forth from Hotel to boat ( the nearest hotel is about 10 miles). The boat "splashed" on Saturday, April 21. The weather is perfect, calm wind, abundant sunshine and temperatures high 73 and about 50 in the evening. We stored the boat at Old Bay Marina at Sparrow's Point, Maryland, about 25 minutes from Baltimore. It's an old-fashioned boat yard where you can do your own work and there are no locked gates nor codes to remember and no dockhands or ship's store. It's great.

ATCHAFALAYA ADVENTURE
RED RIVER RENDEZVOUS

Introduction
Those of you who travel from marina to marina, never venturing off the beaten track may
skip to the next article-this will not interest you.

Location: Louisiana, more specifically 95 miles west of the Harvey Lock (New Orleans) on the
Gulf (of Mexico) Intracoastal Waterway at its junction with the Atchafalaya River.

Time of Year: Fall, September through December. This is by far the best season in Louisiana
to boat. Cool and relatively low humidity. Secondly, this is when the Atchafalaya and Red
Rivers are at their lowest stage-translated-minimum current.

HELLO ALL STATIONS, HELLO ALL STATIONS

Pat and I are off on a boat trip. We left Patterson on Sept. 30th. This one is a bit more ambitious than our previous ones. We thought a thousand to two thousand five hundred mile trips were long but this will be three thousand five hundred miles or so and two oil changes on the road! Since we don’t plan to return until mid December I will have to add to this several times. The itinerary is head east to Mobile, the point of beginning. As Pat says, we have to travel five days to start! Our first stop was at a friend’s in Houma, then the BOOMTOWN CASINO dock in Harvey. It is convenient and free. We are well situated there to lock across the Mississippi the next morning. We have been spoiled by real fast Mississippi River transits of 1.5 hrs so this one of 2.5 hours seemed long but it ain’t the old 6 to 8 hr. waits of the past with surly lockkeepers, now only the bridgekeepers are surly. Everyone be prepared for a big change though because Pat says she will be writing to Mayor Nagin and I’m sure that will take care of all of the problems with transiting through New Orleans!