Chapter 76: Preparing to leave…again.

This week was great as we visited the kids in Atlanta for a long weekend💛!!!  We drove to Atlanta on Saturday to spend some time with Kat, Nick, and Gabby.  It was great to see Kat’s new place in Atlanta (and Sage even though she thought it was playtime at night, meowing and playing with the shades!) Kat’s apartment is less than 10 minutes from Nick and Gabby’s place, I love that they are so close to each other!  We had a super fun visit, watching the Grammy’s together, eating a lot of good food, playing games, and visiting some fun ATL spots- but most importantly just spending time together. It was hard saying goodbye on Tuesday (I always cry 🥹- sorry kids) as we don’t have our next visit planned yet but I am hopeful it will not be too long until they can all come for a visit onboard Meraviglia somewhere fun and warm!

Back on board Meraviglia, we are in serious preparation mode for getting ready to leave again.  Hopefully the third time’s the charm🤞  We spent Wednesday installing a fan for our new dual alternators and working on provisioning lists. We still need to ensure the alternators are working correctly so that the batteries are charging fully.  We have the rental car for another day to get our propane tanks refilled, make a Sam’s club run, and final trips to West Marine and Home Depot. We want to do a day sail to get our sails up and check everything out as we only motored on our ICW trips and have not had the sails up since we had to adjust the backstay. We have also begun to more closely look at routing and weather for possible departure next week. The weather and sea state will be dictating our departure so we are hopeful for some good weather windows to go offshore as we definitely do not want to do the ICW again (we finally have the anemometer fixed after our last ICW adventure!!!) Because we have been down this path before unsuccessfully,  I am trying hard to just stay cool and not get too excited.  It was certainly disappointing to have the setbacks we faced but I know that all of them were important to ensure we have a safe and seaworthy vessel.  So here we are again, looking at departing Brunswick for points south and dreaming of fair winds and following seas….