We rented a car and drove out to Kissimmee, where we stopped in at a building advertising "Tourist Information! Discount Hotels! Theme Park Tickets!" to get Disney World tickets and see about a hotel room. It was Friday afternoon, and the man behind the counter smiled knowingly. "Getting away for the weekend?"
"Something like that," I mumbled, not wanting to get into long explanations; eventually, though, the "truth" came out that we weren't getting away from our day jobs, like normal people. "I wish I had your life," said the man behind the counter. But we were happy to be on vacation.
Lots of people think that our life is nothing but vacation. I always explain that it's not so much a permanent vacation as it is a permanent weekend -- but before you can go to the beach, you need to mow the lawn, fix the dripping bathroom faucet, take down the storm windows, and do the laundry. There are a lot of dripping faucets, metaphorically speaking, on a boat.
Right now we're a little daunted by the list of things we'd like to accomplish before leaving the country. Britt has his heart set on a "Tank Tender", a system which monitors the amount of fuel and water in each of our tanks, and he wants to re-do the wind generator wiring in a more efficient way. I want to get a couple of solar panels. But even before we go shopping again, we have a number of things sitting around waiting to be done. We need to install our new Pactor IIe HF radio modem and figure out how to use it, and we need to install the new cooling fans and gauge we got for the watermaker, re-install the membrane, and get it going again. We have to put protective strips on the sides and bottom of the dinghy. The forward head needs to be rebuilt. And so on.
And lately things just haven't been a lot of fun. We've been racing south rather than sight-seeing and socializing, in offshore hops just long enough to get dazed and sleep-deprived but not long enough to get into any sort of rhythm. The result is a sort of half-life, where we end up doing a lot of reading but not much of anything else. Is it any wonder we needed a vacation break?
Britt had only been to Disney Land in California, and I hadn't been to Disney World since the early 1980s, when Space Mountain was state-of-the-art and Epcot had just opened. Now Disney World has expanded to four theme parks, and we spent one day at each of them in a whirlwind blast of sensory bombardment. Here we are now, entertain us! Disney, naturally, delivered.
We were a little disappointed by Pirates of the Caribbean, which seemed smaller and less thrilling than either of us remembered. So we're going to contact the Disney office and pitch a new ride: Cruisers of the ICW!
While waiting in line, you pass through simulated marine stores, decorated with expensive boat parts, until you are loaded on to your "boat" at a "marina dock". The ride begins with a section through the Dismal Swamp Canal, with artificial trees dripping artificial moss close above you, and Audio-Animatronic turtles on simulated logs. You emerge into a wide lagoon -- suddenly, a powerboat zooms by you, throwing a wake that rocks you back and forth! The "boat" zigs and zags among "buoys" and big signs: "WARNING! Shallow water ahead!" With no warning, the "boat" suddenly decelerates to a dead stop -- you're "aground"! The "boat" backs off and continues in another direction. This time, you're in a wide river, and the current sucks you around, bringing you scarily close to a half-sunk derelict before spitting you out into...a STORM! You rock this way and that in the huge waves which threaten to swamp your little craft but never quite do more than spray you a little (this is Disney, after all), and finally end up in a canal again, where you come closer and closer and closer to a low-clearance bridge...which lifts at the last second, letting you pass through and into the unloading zone. What a ride!
Like any vacation, ours was over too soon. We returned to the boat as an arctic front dropped the temperature below freezing -- so much for "catching up to summer." I know we shouldn't complain, after seeing television footage of huge storms in the midwest and even snow in Georgia, but it seems that cold weather follows us around like an over-friendly Saint Bernard who just won't get the hint that we don't want to play. We closed up the dorade vents we'd just uncovered, pulled out the fleece sweaters, and turned on the heater.
Speaking of cold, after four days among crowds I (predictably) came down with one. Britt will no doubt catch it from me soon, as it's pretty hard to keep a cold to oneself on a 40-foot boat. This makes three in three months, and Britt and I are both sick of being sick. By contrast, we hadn't gotten a single cold from the time we left Colorado last spring, up until we hit New York in early October. Maybe we've lost some natural immunity by spending most of our time apart from large groups of people, because it seems like every time we're in a city or at a big gathering, we get sick.
Since I've got this stupid cold, I don't feel much like going out to do our major provisioning, even though we have the car for a few more days. As it turns out, it would be tough anyway, because we got yelled at for leaving our dinghy at the condo dock, and for parking our car there when we got back. We basically have nowhere to go ashore unless we're sneaky about it (or want to dinghy a mile to an unprotected rough-water spot).
This all just reminds us of how sucky cruising in Florida is. With the exception of Fernandina Beach (which is practically in Georgia anyway), there are few places to land a dinghy. Every bit of water frontage is private, and marinas either flatly refuse access or charge high fees. (The only marina here in Indian Harbour Beach that has a dinghy dock charges $300/month for the privilege. When we spent two months in Annapolis last summer, we paid $400/month for our big boat, which included water and electricity.) In South Florida, there are anchoring restrictions and fees. It's frustrating, because the towns along the ICW are basically big strip-mall subdivisions, teeming with Wal-Marts and Publix supermarkets and West Marines and hardware stores and liquor stores and all sorts of other places where we would gladly spread our money around the community -- but they won't let us. I've heard that some communities don't like cruisers because we don't pay local tax, and yet use local services (such as trash disposal). But Florida doesn't have an income tax, and each time we buy things in town we pay sales tax. We don't mind paying reasonable fees for trash disposal or dinghy dock usage (reasonable being on the order of $2/day). I also have heard that there is a problem with people "moving in" and anchoring permanently. It seems to me that there ought to be a way of controlling that without discouraging people who are visiting for a short term.
By contrast, the Chesapeake Bay area is mostly cruiser-friendly, with Annapolis being a stellar example: every street which ends at the water is a public dinghy landing. Even in New England, where moorings crowd out the anchoring room, nearly every community provides a floating dinghy dock. Most towns along the ICW between the Chesapeake and Florida actively encourage boaters to stop (and spend money). It's too bad that Florida is so nasty about public access for boaters.
