The Chesapeake Continued: Washington DC, Annapolis highlights. By Annie


Feel free to skip to the pictures at the end of the post!
We continue to make our way south through the Chesapeake.  We stopped in Annapolis for a full week - both to see Annapolis (the sailing capital of the United States), and to park ourselves in a good place for my mom to visit, and to see the sites in D.C.  We spent four days in DC - this was a whirlwind tour of our nation's capital, and we saw so many amazing things in a very short time.  We have to thank the Smithsonian for being free - we were able to skip from museum to museum and spend just an hour or two if that's all we wanted to see; if we had been spending $120 on admission for the family per museum, we would have felt obliged to stay until attention spans were low and tempers flaring, and thus we not have been able to go to so many museums or see so many great things.  Some highlights, in my opinion:  the Lincoln memorial, the Hope Diamond, Abe Lincoln's top hat from the night he was assassinated, the whole American History museum, and the founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights).  I also really like the US Postal museum - it brought back a lot of my memories about my dad and his work.  

 After Annapolis, we have been sailing south little by little, to get to Norfolk by October 26th so Rogge can prepare for the Salty Dawg rally.  For the last three days we have been at anchorages surrounded mostly by nature, no longer in big cities.  Although four days ago, the temperature was up to 92 degrees F, now it is cooling off and we are feeling the first bit of fall, which is a welcome relief.  

 Yesterday, we had a five hour passage from our anchorage close to Still Waters Park to our current location in La Trappe Creek.  Wind was 20-25 knots, and although the first part was downwind, we ended up needing to eventually turn into a beam reach.  With white-caps and gusts up to 30 knots, the kids got pretty seasick.  I (somehow) didn't get seasick at all, and in fact was excited to be going fast for the first sail in some time.  We hit 11 knots on the downwind portion - this was the fastest we have actually clocked our boat so far.
My mom, the kids, and myself in front of the Wisconsin pillar in the World War II memorial in D.C.
Fox and Jack in front of an Easter Island head at the museum of Natural History.  There are only two of these heads in the U.S.
My mom and the kids in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
The kids turned our paddle board and our sun shade into a sailing dinghy.  It only went downwind, but then they would paddle it back upwind for another ride. 
Fox caught a Maryland blue crab in Annapolis, which we cooked and ate!


Sunset last night (10/4) in La Trappe Creek. 
Sunrise this morning (10/5) in La Trappe Creek, MD.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changes, again. By Annie

Image
Changes, again. We are seven months into one year of travelling.  Whew!  This has been a lot of travelling, although different from normal travel insofar as we travel with our house now, and don't have to pack for each new destination.  After sailing/moving nearly every day between June 2019, and November 2019, once we all made it to the Caribbean, we just wanted to stay in one place for awhile.  We spent about six weeks in Culebra, which we all regarded as our home away from home for that time.  This was interspersed with two one-week trips to St. John (including stops at St. Thomas on the way there and back each time).  This was followed by three weeks in Vieques.  During this time, we also had FOUR week-long visits from various family members - Rogge's mother, my sister and her family, Rogge's father and step-mom, and my mother.  Lots of fun to see family and catch up. As of last week, we are on the mainland of Puerto Rico, moving along the southern coast.  We are m
Read more

Sailing out of NYC, by Jack

Image
posted by Jack Yesterday we sailed out of New York City early in the morning.  It was a eight-hour sail. I pretty much slept through the whole thing except the first and last hours.  It was cool to see the statue of Liberty's front side from a distance.  When we finally finished the passage, we went to a stretch of a huge one hundred mile long beach that is the Jersey shore.  There were huge waves and huge clam shells.  Towards the end of our stay at the beach I saw a dorsal fin sticking up out of the water about 300 feet away.  I started to panic because I thought it was a shark.  When we were about half way in to the beach we looked back and saw four of them gliding out of the water and we realized that they were dolphins.  They continued to jump for a long time.  We don't have any pictures because they were too far away to really capture on camera. Statue of liberty on our way out of the harbor
Read more

The first two days, by Jack

Image
posted by Jack June 24:   It was the first official day of our endeavor.  We left Sturgeon Bay and headed for Green Island.  There is an abandoned light house on the island but when we got there the trail to it was overgrown and covered in poison ivy. Fox found a big fishing lure, and that’s when we started to get interested in fishing. We sailed to Peninsula state park and anchored for the night there. June 25: We all had a good first sleep on the boat (except for a minor drawback of a huge spider in my room). In the morning there were two more spiders, one big one in the bathroom and one in the parents’ room. We headed off for Washington Island, a four-and-a-half-hour sail.  To get there we needed to go through a passage called Port des Morts, French for Death’s Door. When we got there, we took a dinghy ride "from hell" over to Rock Island, a smaller island across from Washington. It was horrible because of the big waves and all the splashing. Rock Island was going
Read more