Warning: Detour Ahead [#3]

Our plan was simple-ish — leave Park City on a Saturday, arrive in Maryland on Monday, do a walk-thru of what we hoped would be our boat on Tuesday, have the survey completed before the weekend, and be ready for action within a couple of weeks.

Best laid plans…

We made it through these plans “on time” right up to the survey. As it turns out, only three boat yards on the entire east coast can handle a haul out for a boat with as wide a beam as the one we’re hoping to buy. Begin the detour. With a solid week to kill before we’d even be able to have the boat surveyed (same idea as a home inspection when buying a house), it was time for new ideas.

Gettysburg and Washington, D.C., were obvious choices and after 4 days exploring both, some key takeaways rose to the top:

1. Learning by seeing and touching and doing are powerful tools and it is a crime that we can’t all learn everything this way all the time
2. Gummy Bears provide exceptional motivation when requesting intelligent feedback and thoughtful analysis from teenage boys
3. Teenage boys are, in fact, capable of providing intelligent feedback and thoughtful analysis
4. Washington, D.C. is incredible. Totally incredible
5. Traveling with a dog in-tow is no where near as impossible as it seemed at the onset of this haphazard week
6. Even the mere promise of a food truck swirl cone is enough to silence whining about walking all the miles all the days

The first half of our surprise detour ended on Mother’s Day at a Marriott in the heart of D.C.

At its wrap, we’d logged over 22 miles on foot, visited and discussed some of the most iconic and important sites, battlefields, buildings, and events in U.S. history, and enjoyed impromptu visits with two old friends. Our detour, though initially unwelcome and stressful, also provided a much-needed respite from all-things-boat-related and gave us a chance to practice rolling with the unexpected — something we all sensed was about to be the new norm.