We've been home for awhile and I honestly haven't had time to think about the stats for the Loop trip. Getting home meant several trips to the boat to carry things back to the apartment that we need there, many hugs and kisses and volleyball games and and poker hands (yes, even the five-year-old plays poker with Grampy), ukulele playing, gardening, winterizing the boat, holidays...it's been a whirlwind and tonight I'm finally sighing a little with relief. I'm really glad we did the trip, but I'm equally glad that we're home now, especially in light of the damage that hurricane Helene has done to all parts south of us. I'm unbelievably glad that we don't have to be the ones making the decision of how far and how fast we're going to be moving south. I think if it was us, we'd be finding a place to park First Light for the winter and going home. Thankfully, we're already there.
So the stats for the trip:
We did 2,424 miles. 458 of them were last year from Oriental, NC to Pasadena, MD, in our abbreviated attempt to get the boat back to St. Louis, derailed by our medical mishaps. The balance of the miles—1,966—we did this year between Pasadena, MD and St. Louis.
We moved 143 days with 372 hours underway at an average of 6.2 knots. (Ignore the max speed above of 54.2 knots - that was because I had the app tracking us while we were in a car with a friend :)
I tried to keep track of anchoring nights vs paid dock nights vs free dock nights but we just had too much else on our minds to keep up with it. The reality of it is that we spent way more time on the dock and lock walls than we did anchoring. We anchored primarily when we were traveling with our grandson in 2023 from NC to MD, but once we started on the river system, there weren't near as many opportunities to anchor as on the ICW and coastal cities. I kind of like the wall tie-offs though. It's nice to just pull up to some cleats on the wall and be done for the day with town and services being just a few steps away. It's also much better for socializing since everyone is right there and it gives you the opportunity to pull up a folding chair and chat with your travel friends for the evening. When you're anchored, it requires launching the dinghy to have the same opportunities so there's a lot to be said for the walls. The New York and Canadian portions of the Loop had many better lock walls than later in the trip. Once you head into the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, you're much more limited in stopping places.
I've had so many people ask us if we're going to finish the Loop or not. We have done a little more than 3/4 of it between the time we spent on Kintala and the time we spent on First Light, but the answer is a firm "no". I'm incredibly glad we made the trip. It was a fantastic experience, but it was much harder than we expected it to be. The sheer volume of lock transits, and the schedule that you have to keep in order to be where you need to be before the weather changes, can make it pretty exhausting. To be fair, a lot of the stress we experienced (other than having our boat dropped in the railroad lift...) was because of doing it so soon after Tim's cardiac arrest. That experience had a huge impact on our whole view of travel. Anchoring in the more remote places in Canada without medical services more readily available was making it tough to relax. Going through something like that tends to change your outlook just a bit.
So First Light is settled in her home base at Alton Marina and we'll enjoy her over the season with the local grandkids. After that? We're not sure. We may sell her in the fall and do some land travel for awhile or we may keep her another season. In the mean time, we're making more memories and adding photos to our screensaver. And that's a pretty good way to spend the year.
