On the road again: C-Brats James River Cruise Out

We are back on the road again but before we write about our next leg, I need to tell you about a new "don't".... or I guess it is a "do".  Before you leave your home state on a cross country adventure, make sure have your car "smogged" if you don't plan to be back when the registration comes due.  Even if you aren't sure a smog is going to be needed.  We had just done a smog with the prior year's registration, so it didn't occur to us that re-registering would mean more than just writing a check.  However, when we got home we found that the registration materials in the mail required the smog.  Rob tried to explain that the car was out of state but they insisted that it must be smogged.  Luckily, we had left keys with our son, so he took the vehicle out of storage, had it smogged and sent us the paperwork.  We aren't sure what we would have done otherwise... even if we had gotten it smogged when we arrived back in VA, how would we have gotten the Nevada stickers sent to us while enroute?

This time, we're going to be gone for around 2 months so we also hired a company to that will accept our mail, send us email about all first class items received, scan if we feel we might need to see it, and forward it to any location as often as we'd like.    So this is a service you might want to consider if you are cruising long term.

We had originally planned to move north from the DC area to Philadelphia and NYC and beyond...BUT our Virginia based C-Brats friends organized another cruise out so we decided to head south first.  We picked up the boat at the Occoquan Marina  where we had the bottom painted and had it buffed and waxed.  It looked great !

We enjoyed watching them launch it with the crane, at which point we retrieved it at the ramp with the trailer.

We drove down to Portsmouth VA where our cruise began at the home of our hosts.  They hosted a party the night before for any local C-Brats (and included a few boaters with other brands).  We had met a few of these folks before, but other faces were new.  Not everyone was coming on the cruise but no one can pass on a party "catered" by Joan or the chance to chat about boating adventures.

I have been challenged to find a way to incorporate this funny story which became the "theme" of our cruise. It didn't happen to me, but I did see a picture... On the morning of the party, Joan and her sister were at the mall.  They stopped for a Starbucks and saw a woman with a little girl and also, separately pushing a stroller.  As she moved closer they saw that there was a large rooster in the stroller!  The rooster had a tutu and its "nails" were painted blue.  They couldn't resist asking the woman about this.  Turns out the rooster was a "service chicken" to help calm her daughter, who possibly had autism.  The joke of the service chicken morphed into jokes about any other ridiculous service animal that could be imagined... Much hilarity was enjoyed on this subject. If anyone was monitoring the marine radio station 68, they would have thought we were crazy.

The cruise went out the Elizabeth River, past Norfolk, past Hampton, passed where the Monitor and Merrimac battled... then up the James River and up the Pagan River.  The next day we went out the Pagan up the James, past Jamestown then up the Chickahominy River.  We spent three nights at marinas along the way... more specifics to follow.