Today marks three full weeks o’ babblin’ bloggy bologna ’round here.

And yes, I am taking a moment to self-celebrate these little milestones. Blame it on the project manager day job.

So our plans for this weekend are somewhat nebulous. We have family in town, and they’ve requested some hiking time around Lake Willoughby.

And I happen to know a little girl who counts Lake Willoughby among her very favorite places on Earth…

The other option on the table is a drive down to Burlington on Saturday for the ribbon cutting on their new waterfront sailing dock.

For the unaware, I’ve spent a good bit of my life sailing on various boats, one of which was even my own…Eidolon.

I sold Eidolon once we had Daphne (like you do when you become a dad and other priorities arise), but I still like to keep my toe dipped in that water, so to speak.

Also it sounds like they’ve built some adaptive measures along the new waterfront dock to assist sailors with disabilities in boarding their boats. That is both a very Vermontish thing to do, and something that I absolutely want to support.

I’ve often said that I’d like to own a sailboat again. And given that we’re less than 3 hours from some pretty nice marinas on the Atlantic, I’d like to think that I’d be able to do so in the near future. It would be a pretty amazing thing to be able to sail out to Nantucket in the summer. A lifelong dream, really…
I mean, obviously you could always charter a boat but I feel like that kind of misses the point. There’s a freedom inherent in sailing, when you’re traveling at a pace that the wind sets for you. Being able to move that way, without a countdown clock nagging at the back of your mind (“we have to be back to turn in the boat before noon on Sunday…”) is very much part of the experience, at least for me.

Guess we’ll see what the future holds there…

The other large locomotive expense we’ve regularly discussed (and one I believe Daphne would vote for well ahead of a sailboat), is an one of these…

It just so happens that we live in a trail-riding mecca, with mountain bikers, snowmobilers, and ATV riders coming from all over the country to take advantage of the VASA and VAST trails here in the Northeast Kingdom.

Daphne got to ride in one of these a couple years ago, as we were leaving a mountain bike race at Burke, and she’s been in love with them ever since.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t make sense to me to purchase one of these if we can’t all ride in it together. Which means it has to be a 4-seater. Which means it will cost us more than our Subaru did. And that’s simply not an expense we can take on right now, despite how much this little girl wants one.

Sailboats and go-karts… Expensive toys. Guess Dad needs to get to work.

See you Monday.

j.s.