June 7, 2008: New York City, NY

Last night, we came by Manhattan after dark and saw the wonder of all the city lights as we headed south to Staten Island. It was a little stressful cruising across the harbor full of commercial shipping in the dark, but we did find safe passage and spent the night at the Great Kills Yacht Club. This morning we had waffles before casting off for the 79^th Street Boat Basin where we tied up to a mooring ball. Using a mooring ball was a new experience. It was fun to take the dinghy to shore and to find a duck’s nest on the end of the remote dock.

We met Carey and Sammy (niece and nephew) at Columbus Circle and had lunch viewing the statue of Columbus through the glass wall on the 2^nd floor. After that, we walked by the IBM building at 590 Madison Avenue to the destination shopping store – Destination Maternity. It was great that they had a wide screen TV, leather chairs, wireless laptop for the guys in the group, while the ladies shopped for maternity clothes for Laurie. Then, with the temperature over 100 degrees, we checked out a famous ice cream place, Glom for Italian gelato and hopefully worked off some of the calories with all the walking. Actually we cheated and took a taxi back to the boat basin where we all dingy’ed out to the boat to grill out for dinner.

June 6: Long Island Sound headed west

We said goodbye to the swans of New Haven that guarded the opening to the Quinnipiac River this morning. It was rainy and gray as we pulled out, but a transition day with great anticipation of Laurie and Brian coming tonight. The trip across the bay was uneventful, with blue gray water and sky and slightly darker blue gray land on the horizon. We passed several little doll houses set up as channel markers where there were reefs in the sound. I actually thought they looked like submarines that had surfaced with their control tower riding on top of a little bit of their fuselage. They were actually large enough that someone could have lived there but we saw no signs of habitation. One of them that was actually on one of the Norwalk Islands was the Sheffield Island Lighthouse which had been made into a museum.

We did discover the music box that I heard last Tuesday though. We heard the music again and this time investigated more closely. We found a large red buoy that had three bells mounted vertically in its center. Then there were pendulums hung above the bells which swing as the buoy rocked but the pendulums each only moved when the buoy rocked in a specific plane. So as the buoy danced around, the pendulums each struck a different bell independently and played a little random song of three notes. Pretty cool, huh.

Entering the East River, we went under the Whitestone Bridge on our way to La Guardia airport. It is a bridge which I frequently cross getting into New York. It was fun to see it from the river, and the Kathleen tugboat came by just in time to make the picture. Laurie and Brian are due in tonight and we are meeting them at the Worlds Fair Marina – built in 1964 and one of the places my family came on our trip to New York when I was a sophomore in high school.

June 5, 2008: New Haven and Mystic

Today we decided that since we had the car we should make a road trip. It gave us the flexibility to go a little father than we could in a day in the boat, so we drove to Mystic, CT. We wanted to see the Historic Seaport and to reminisce about being there once before when Laurie was a Girl Scout. There are several old sailing ships there including the Charles Morgan which is the last wooden whaling ship in existence. We ate at the S&P Oyster Company where Tom got the Lobster Hot Dog – a unique New England treat. Our table overlooked the draw bridge over the Mystic River and watched the friendly bridge tender raise it at least three times during lunch.

We found the Eli Whitney Museum which was housed in the armory where he devised the manufacturing process for rifles using the first “interchangeable parts”. It was his greatest invention. Eli Whitney, born in 1665 and attended Yale until he dropped out because he ran out of money. He headed south to find his fortune where he invented the cotton gin which combed the cotton seeds from the cotton fibers. I remember a cotton gin humming on the corner across from my grandmother’s house in Round O, SC, when I was a little girl. The cotton gin changed the course of business in that it helped the farmer’s produce enough cotton for export. He later changed the concepts of the industrial revolution by introducing manufacturing done with separated steps. He used power machinery driven by a water wheel on the Mill River. There was an exhibit showing how the waterwheel powered a huge turning grinding stone used for polishing the gun barrels. There is now a waterfall there and an old red covered wooden bridge which goes over to the stone house where his son later lived. Eli operated the armory manufacturing guns for the US from 1798-1825.

On our way home we stopped at the Peabody Museum to see the wonderful exhibit on dinosaurs. I wanted to see the fossilized skeleton of a giant sea turtle there that is over 10 feet long. The skeleton looked just like the green sea turtle we have off our coast in NC except that it was considerable larger. This specific one was missing his hind right flipper, but other than that was totally complete. Ironically the live sea turtle we saw in the Baltimore aquarium was missing the same flipper. The turtle bones were actually discovered in an archeological dig in 1895 in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I wonder when there was a sea in South Dakota!

We toured around Yale for a bit whose campus covers 310 acres in New Haven. The school named after Eli Yale dates back to 1718. There was certainly no lack of funding for this well endowed university ($22.5 billion dollars – pretty amazing, huh). The architecture is really impressive, with massive towers and gates into inner courtyards similar to Oxford. We passed by the Yale Law school, begun in 1824 and housed in a building like a cathedral; and even the gym was amazingly elegant.

Tonight for dinner we went to Louis’ Lunch, a legendary New Haven landmark. The guide book says that Louis Laseen was the inventor of the hamburger. That he was the first one to chop up steak, press it together and serve it between bread. In any case, they cook their burgers in an interesting way – between two grills held vertically over an enclosed gas grill and did serve them on toasted bread, not in buns. It was a fun old place, Tom and I sat in a narrow little booth just for two, and the burgers were pretty good. After dinner the big outing was to the laundry mat. Tomorrow Laurie and Brian are coming for a visit, and we can hardly wait.

June 4, 2008: Northport to New Haven, CT

It rained all night and all this morning, but the birds of the Britannia marina in Northport loved it. There were Canadian geese with brown fuzzy goslings, long necked graceful white swans, wood ducks, and a snowy white egret all feathering around the waterfront which varied greatly depending on the tide. We filled up with fuel at $4.79 this time, and set out around lunch time. We had a calm and restful crossing of the Long Island sound towards Connecticut. It was amazingly calm since this sound is quite as large as the Pamlico Sound only much deeper. On the trip, we encountered a very interesting sight. In the middle of the sound we came upon two huge ships tightly aligned side to side. As we approached, we could not figure out why they were so close together since that is fairly unusually. As we got closer, we realized that one of the freighters had several cranes and it was retrieving cargo from the other ship; even closer, we saw that the cranes were actually huge digger jaws and they were moving coal. We played a little game suggesting all the reasons this could be happening starting from out right piracy (we have been watching Captain Jack Sparrow), to perhaps the coal was sold to someone who owned their own ship and wanted to handle the transport. Anyway, it was fun to discover and something we had never seen before. We also passed Eton’s Neck lighthouse which is the 2nd oldest light house in New York, 1799 and was one of the first life saving stations.

Tonight we are docked in New Haven, Connecticut at a marina that does not usually take boats our size. When there were no slips at the larger marina, he agreed to take us in, saying that he had been to Beaufort, NC, experienced Southern hospitality and wanted to reciprocate.

We connected with a rental car have seen some of the city. Here we found the story of the very first pizza. It was made by Frank Pepe who came over from Italy in the early 1900’s. After working making bread for someone else, he and his wife opened their own bakery often working 18 hour days and delivering bread in a horse drawn cart. Then he began taking bread dough and flattening it into a circle and adding fresh tomato sauce, grated cheese and anchovies. His granddaughter said that the circle of dough traditionally received the leftovers of a previous meal to make another meal. He called it “the poor man’s answer to hunger” and in 1925 began making these pies to sell in his store. The store front on Wooster street had a line when we arrived. They sold pizzas and soft drinks, no salads or other menu extensions, and we got to see them sliding the pizzas into the original coal burning brick oven that reminded me of the one in Tryon’s Palace in New Bern, NC. By the way, our pepperoni and mushroom pizza was delicious...

June 3: Long Island Sound

Long Island Sound, NY
When we got up this morning, Tom told me that I was lucky I got to sleep through the night! Apparently in the middle of the night, he heard the ropes securing us to the dock groaning. As the tide went out and the boat went lower and lower relative to the stationary dock, the ropes were becoming like guitar strings being tightened. He was the hero though and got up and untied and adjusted them. We found out this morning that this area has tide fluctuations of 11 feet of vertical drop. That’s a pretty significant swing when you are not moored to a floating dock.
After breakfast we set off across the New York harbor. It was an adventure to see the city from this perspective. There were huge freighters in the harbor some loaded with containers the size of tractor trailer trucks. The water was pretty rough, so my pictures may be a little blurry. I took a lot of pictures of the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island as she such an icon representing the US. She was a gift to the United States in 1886 from the people of France as a celebration of our Centennial. (Yes, the lady was about 10 years late in arriving, but the design began in 1870). It matches a smaller figure in Paris in the Jardin of Luxemburg. The framework for the statue was constructed by Gustave Eiffel who would later become famous for the Eiffel Tower. She has solid copper sheathing which is now colored by a green patina except for her gilded torch of gold leaf. The torch held high seems to glow from the distance we saw her.

We enjoyed our ride up the East river under the sequence of bridges that connect Manhattan with the East. We wound past the United Nations building and La Guardia Airport both of which front on the river. At lunch time, we anchored just off a sandy beach in the Long Island Sound and took our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the bow for a picnic. The water was calm, the sun delightful, and the breeze making the setting very comfortable. It seemed, just to make it perfect, that I could hear a music box playing. This was actually somewhat surreal so I set about trying to figure out where the music was coming from because it did not seem like it was from the shore. We finally decided that it was a series of buoys which had bells ringing different notes at a distance and the breeze was blowing them in our direction. Just perfect.
On our way into the NorthPort Bay, we passed Huntington, NY. The famous poet Walt Whitman was called the bard of Huntington and his family’s 1400 acre home place was there. He died in 1892 and also has a bridge in Philadelphia named after him. You might remember his poem, “O Captain, My Captain”, but it was pretty grim since his ship captain was dead... Oh well. Docked at the Britannia Yacht Center and safely tied to floating docks this time, we took our bikes into town to find dinner and a grocery store. It seemed like it was uphill both ways and I wound up walking part of the way to make it. We had a great dinner at a little Italian restaurant where you had the sense that everything really was home made. I had the lobster ravioli – yum, yum! We also saw an interesting tree in front of the First Presbyterian Church - from a distance looked like dogwood, but the four petal white flower was shaped differently. Does anyone know what this is?

June 2: Atlantic Heights

June 2, 2008: Atlantic Ocean and Atlantic Highlands
We got up early this morning to get started by 7:30 AM. On June 2, the green channel marker #1 in Cape May still had a mother osprey sitting on her nest as we passed by. Today Mother Nature smiled on us and gave us a calm day to enter the Atlantic Ocean for the run up the New Jersey shoreline. There were no white caps and just around 2 foot swells as we cruised north just about a mile off the beach. We passed the big casinos of Atlantic City, and drove through some favorite fishing holes where suddenly in the immense ocean you would come to 6 to 8 boats all floating along together fishing.
Seven hours is a long day on the water but by 3:00 PM we were pulling into Atlantic Highlands on the Sandy Hook on the southern rim of the New York harbor. It will be exciting to get to see New York from the water. We should see The Statue of Liberty tomorrow in the harbor.
The Sandy Hook Lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse in the United States and has been in continuous use since 1764. Tom took the 20 mile bike ride out to see it in person and was amazed that over time, the beach migration has actually moved it water away from this lighthouse. After dinner, we realized we should have brought a fishing net with us. Apparently a school of small minnows was swimming in the boat docking area and the running blue fish spotted them. Suddenly the water was churning as though it was batter in a mixing bowl. The blue fish were jumping and splashing all over the surface as they gobbled up the bait fish and the seabirds soared over it all hoping for a meal of their own.

June 1: Cape May

We waited for Julie Anna and Ben to get back from their 6 mile run to have breakfast together Sunday morning (Oh, to be young and have so much energy!). This morning we worshiped with the Island Cape Baptist Church. This was a small church affiliated with the American Baptist convention. Records show that there were Baptists living on Cape Island before 1695. After its formation in 1712 they attended the First Baptist Church in Cape May Court House, twelve miles to the north and then in 1844 founded the Island Cape church. The church had six stained glass windows and each one had a verse from the Beatitudes highlighted in it. The opening congregational hymn was accompanied by four handbell ringers, a trumpet player and the organ for a happy beginning to the service and their choir sang a medley of old hymns. Their bulletin insert told about a project in Zimbabwe to provide for AIDs orphans and we felt we were in a good place. We participated in the Lord’s Supper with them and were blessed to be with God’s children in Cape May. After church we went to the Lobster House for Sunday dinner and had a table overlooking the water (we could actually see our boat from there). I tried to get hushpuppies, but we have gotten too far north for them to know what we were talking about. Our sweet weekend with Julie Anna and Ben was quickly coming to and end and they packed up after lunch and headed back to Philadelphia.
In the later afternoon, Tom and I went for a 9 mile bike ride back through the water front of Cape May and saw a beautiful wedding on the beach. There were surfers there in wetsuits enjoying the most of the height of the waves. I assumed the water was cold was the sun was warm. There was the lighthouse in the distance across the glittering water. We stopped again on the Washington Street mall for a little shopping, listened to their big clock chiming a ten minute concert and a sipped a Mocha Ice Cream smoothie. Wow!

May 31, 2008: Back to Cape May

Coming back from New York, I picked up Julie Anna and Ben at the airport in Philadelphia. We made a quick mini tour of the Independence National Park and saw the Liberty Bell and the Continental Congress Building in the twilight. We reminisced about US history as we had dinner on the patio at the historic City Tavern before driving south to spend the night at the South Jersey Marina in Cape May.

On Saturday morning we drove through the 235 acre Cape May Point State Park. There we saw the point lighthouse built in 1859. It was originally operated by oil lamps and prisms and lenses and Tom and Julie Anna and Ben climbed the 199 steps to the top. Right in front of it there was a multistory birdhouse fully occupied by tenants. There was also a World War II bunker on the beach built of poured concrete but supported by wooden pilings just like the houses at Emerald Isle. It was built 900 feet from the water in 1942, but now is in the water at high tide because of beach erosion (sound familiar?) Cape May began as a whaling village, and you can still take a cruise for whale sighting. It grew into a resort as the inland cities grew, and the wealthy came looking for a place for quiet and beauty. In the afternoon, we enjoyed a trip through Cape May oohing and ahhing over all the Victorian mansions nestled in neighborhoods just off the beach. The weather was perfect and we enjoyed strolling through the little shops on the outside Washington Street mall. Tom had planned a special dinner at the 5 star Union Park restaurant where we had a wonderful meal finished by a dessert sampler of 9 different delicious treats. After dinner we come home to the boat and I showed Julie Anna some of my knitting and gave her a lesson. It was so much fun to have them here with us.