Today both of us woke up feeling sick. Eric had a sore throat and felt like a cold was coming on. Christi had a sick tummy causing frequent trips to the restroom, no doubt the consequence of the pink hamburger the day before. This is the first time on our entire journey that either of us has ever become sick from something we ate. And it figures that it happened to be from an American style restaurant that almost assuredly uses American beef.

Neither of us felt like doing anything, but we absolutely had to go to the grocery store and get food for all the houseguests we would be having for the transit. Victor only has one day off a week from driving the bus, and today happens to be the day. So, there was no bus to town. The nice marina staff hunted down a private car for us. It appears they have sweet talked their husbands, boyfriends and friends into shuttling cruisers around in their spare time because even professional drivers don’t want to get stuck at the locks forever. On our way out of the base we saw several huge, and we mean really huge, buzzards hanging out on a cleared field on the base grounds.

And we did have to wait a full hour on the way out. This time the ships were going the other way. Two very large ships went in a row before they opened the gate for car traffic. We didn’t have a very good view, but we could see the locomotives pull one ship in, then the ship rose up out of our line of sight. Then the locomotives brought another ship in, and it Continue reading →