November 4-5

November 4 Another planned layover day. Remember the dinghy race during the rendezvous? We raced backwards blindfolded and the above picture shows me blindfolding John before the race. Today was a lazy day. I cleaned the eisenglass on the flybridge. We had a good cable TV connection and the plan was to cheer the Colts on to victory. Alabama played LSU on Saturday and this is serious Alabama football country here. There was plenty of blaring of boat horns as Alabama scored touchdowns Saturday. I was going to blow the boat horn long and hard if the Colts won, but that didn't happen. I asked one of the Alabama fans what they did when football season is over as basketball isn't talked about here. He said they start talking about Alabama spring training! A cool but sunny day. The girls fixed a beef roast in the oven for dinner. Very good

November 5 The time change brings about daylight earlier now. We were all up at 6am anticipating an early departure for the next stop downriver. About 6:10 am we were advised the lock was ready for us. Wheeler lock is only about a mile away. Five boats took off for the lock. Carol Anne, Salty Turtle, Legrace, Time Out and ourselves. We locked right through. Another 15 miles downriver is Wilson Lock. Our flock of boats managed to just beat a double tow coming up river and that allowed us to lock through Wilson without delay. The depth sounder on the boat read 114 feet as we entered the lock-- after the lockmaster finished lowering our boats the new reading was 17 feet--97 feet down!. No delays so we arrived at our planned destination of Florence AL at 10 am. This was planned as we have UPS packages arriving here. The rest of the boats continued on down River. It is now 7:50 pm and UPS says the packages will be delivered! We'll see. This marina has a courtesy car so it was put to use and off we went in search of a Casa's a local Mexican Restaurant which was purported to be very good. Indeed it was. We also picked up some bread and milk. Very nice town and shopping areas. it is very nice out this evening the doors of the boat are open now --but a cold front is coming through--perhaps some rain tonight and a lot cooler tomorrow-52 high-30ish tomorrow night