The Adventures of Monk's Vineyard - The Great Loop and Beyond: August 21, Day 69

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

August 21, Day 69 - In Midland

Sunshine welcomed us this morning. We read about a “Tugfest” that was happening here today (complete with pancake breakfast), so we decided to wander over. Unfortunately, most of the activities don’t start until Saturday. Friday was posted as “watch the tugs arrive”. There were about a dozen boats already there, but no other activities and no pancake breakfast. We got a recommendation from the locals for breakfast and wandered up to The Den’s Skillet. It was really good food and even Steve thought the waitress was nice. We wandered the town some more and Steve and Karen tried to find T-shirts that would be a souvenir of the Georgian Bay area. When they couldn’t find any they liked, they had some made (for all of us). They turned out really “cute, cute, cute”. After that we tried to find someplace close that had a thumb drive for sale so we could download pictures off of Karen’s camera. (It was FULL). No luck there so we got a blank CD from the marina office, but even that didn’t have enough room.

Sadly, the time arrived for our company to leave. We really had a fun time with Steve and Karen and will certainly miss their company and help with the boat. We hope they had a good time during their Trent-Severn/Georgian Bay journey.

The rest of the afternoon was spent doing laundry and having the marina folks help Gerry with routes through Georgian Bay and the North Channel.

Our mail still hasn’t arrived, so we will have it forwarded to Mackinac Island Marina when it gets here.

We walked back into town to have dinner. On the way, we picked up some flypaper (darn things drive us crazy) at the local hardware store. We ate at the Explorer’s Restaurant and had a wonderful meal. This was an interesting place. The owner and his wife used to get around a lot (Antartica, Africa, the Amazon, etc. ) and there were lots of interesting memorabilia decorating the dining area. He stopped by the table and we chatted about wine.

We stopped by the TugFest after dinner to see if any more tugs had arrived. There were about 6 more, mostly the big guys. The dock area was packed with folks and there was a band playing.

We headed home to work on the blog and turned in early. We plan on leaving first thing in the morning.