Expectations are always wrong

We haven’t posted here in a few days, because … we’ve been busy. And TIRED. When we set out on a 22-year-old boat we knew things would break along the way. We just didn’t expect it to be the, um, sanitation system. In the first week.

More on maintenance challenges separately. But that’s not all we’ve been up to. We’ve learned how to navigate a boat elevator, aka a lock.

We’ve talked to friendly tugboat captains and lockmasters on the VHF radio. We explored Waterford NY, where a morning run through Peebles Island State Park included bald eagles, many beavers, a mysteriously placed rusty old truck in the woods, and a lone heron.

From Waterford we travelled to Amsterdam NY. At sunset, right by our dock there was a pretty tight swing band called the Piggly Wigglies. How a few hipster-ish twenty-somethings ended up starting a swing band in Amsterdam NY we have no idea.

Later we climbed a random hill looking for a view and instead found the town cemetery. As we were investigating the Civil War memorial there, a gray-haired white guy in a pickup truck with red political bumper stickers drove by. Nothing good will come of this, right? It turned out to be Pete, who shared stories about the town’s history as a major carpet milling center. Pete is on the cemetery board and visits every day to speak with his son, who died of a heart attack at age 44.

Pete says if you stand right over a gravestone and speak facing down, the dead will hear you and be glad of your presence, even though they can’t reply. We certainly can’t say that he’s wrong.