September 16, Day 95 - In St. Joseph

Well, the weatherman was right. It blew hard most of the night and is gusting to 24 knots and above. So today will be our first lay day on Lake Michigan – we expected 3 or 4, so we are still in pretty good shape from an itinerary standpoint.

Linda made a great breakfast with her special French toast, bacon, & eggs. We were all fueled up for a ride into town.

Gerry checked the impeller (still looks like new) while Linda updated the blogs (discovered we still had a lot of minutes and data usage before the end of our Verizon billing cycle so decided to use them for the blog update).

After lunch we offloaded the bikes and went for a ride to the end of the pier, to the beach and then into St. Joseph’s. It is a neat little town once you get past all of the construction. After parking the bikes we walked through town and then stopped and had a drink and some appetizers at Schu’s Grill & Bar, a nice place that overlooks Lake Michigan. We then headed back to the boat. The wind had cleared the skies and it turned into a beautiful day – the lake just glistened.

Linda did a couple of loads of laundry and Gerry modified how the dinghy fits on the davits - it comes up a bit easier and quite a bit higher now. Then he worked on the journal and checked the weather for tomorrow. It looks pretty good for a departure tomorrow – we just have to decide where we're going (Chicago, New Buffalo, or Michigan City). We will literally “see which way the wind is blowing” before deciding.

All of the sailboats (well, almost all) headed out of the marina at 6:30 for the Wednesday night races. Brought back a few memories – waiting for crew to show up, the mad rush out of the marina, hoisting the sails, and thankful that there is a nice breeze out there tonight (not like the last 3 weekends around here.)


We noticed the large Coast Guard boat going out early this morning. A little while later in came back in being towed by the smaller Coast Guard boat. Don't know if it had a problem, or if they were just doing training exercises.


Our bike ride along the waterfront revealed glistening, but empty beaches

Another view of the waterfront

In the downtown area of St. Joseph there were decorated animals on every street corner ... here's your friendly hippo

....a peacock (Editors note: let it be known that Linda thought this was an ostrich, Gerry said peacock and since he seems to know "critters" better than Linda she went with his choice. Never thought we'd get so many comments about the fact that it was not a peacock. However, it is nice to know that at least a few people are reading our blog.)
... a gorilla

.... an elephant
.... and Gerry and his friend, the llama