Saturday November 15: Settled in at Vero Beach

It wasn't long until we were settled in our dock here at Vero Beach. And it wasn't much longer before we decided to try out the free bus system the city provides.

Southern Comfort was the breakfast place near Publix - just a short 10 minutes away. No problem finding the place but after waiting about 20 minutes with no breakfast, we decided something must be wrong! Yep - our order was lost :-(

No time now as we didn't want to wait an extra hour for the next bus. Very sad ...

But the fun part of waiting for the bus back was running into one of our dock neighbors and his dog Tucker. How could anyone resist petting this guy?

Tucker wasn't allowed on the bus unless he was in a bag! Pretty funny :-)


Next it was a quick call to Enterprise to rent a car for the weekend. They come pick you up and the car is $40 for 3 days. Bargain right? Especially when we saw our "compact" car - a 6 seated SUV! Worked for us because our goal was to find Steve a new bike.

Seems the "bargain" fix it job didn't last too long. But then in all fairness, the guy in St. Augustine just happened to have a used rear wheel that fit the bike Steve had. His last words of advice to Steve were "I wouldn't put any more money into that bike" so we took him at his word.

So the SUV suited our needs quite fine as we headed off to a big box store for a new bike. We've found that the salt water air just kind of destroys bikes. Our philosophy then is to find an inexpensive bike - use it for a couple of years and then get a new one. Steve now has the brightest bike in the lot!

Interesting in the directions for the bike though: don't use WD-40 on the chain. Seems that it is bad for it - use white lithium grease instead. Oops ... perhaps part of the problem??

That was yesterday (Friday). Today it was time to get some work done.

The sides of the boat were a mess. The yellow from the muddy water was back (especially visible where we didn't repaint the bow a year ago). And there was still a layer of black stuff from sitting in Jacksonville for 5 months.

Time for a cleaning.

The best way to clean the side not next to the dock is from the dinghy. Sadly there is only room for one person in this 10' dinghy so I passed the job over to Steve :-)


After picture tomorrow - but wow does it look better!

Terri and Scott are driving over from Brandenton tomorrow to visit. It'll be nice to see them! Even though Scott is a Bengals fan, he is still welcome on the boat .......