When I first thought of undertaking this adventure I knew that if Mary was going to come along with me then I’d have to make things comfy-cozy or this whole thing would collapse. Riding in a boat for the better part of each day for three weeks doesn’t seem to raise any concern with her but if you were to ask her about sleeping and bathing; then the tune beats to a whole new tempo. I promised her that on this trip she'll not have to suffer regarding these most critical aspects. With some advance knowledge and foresight I should be able to keep from letting her down.
When our children were young we stayed out overnight in our tent on a beach along the Mississippi near Red Wing, MN. It was an interesting experience. Our evening was nice and we cooked hot dogs over an open fire on the beach and all things were nice. But this all changed when some unexpected weather visited us overnight. A heavy thunderstorm had blown through with much lightning and wind and disturbed us a great deal. The kids were oblivious but Mary and I sat up in our tent worried that it might never end.
You forget quickly how powerful a storm feels when you’re outside in the middle of it, especially lying inside a tent. Out of the corners of your eye you see the first distant flashes, then hear the first gentle rumble of distant thunder. You wonder if it is heading somewhere else. The flashes brighten and become more frequent. As the storm builds you anxiously wait and wonder. Then the first synchronized lightning and thunder crash is so close it makes you jump. The rain starts and you hold on knowing the first gust of wind will soon arrive. The thunder crashes with a high fidelity sound you can’t sense when indoors. It’ll hiss and sizzle and its echo coming through the trees is skewed in time from the sound you hear descending out of the sky. As the storm peaks it blows and pours, with terrible flashes, and crashes and you wait to detect the first sign the worst has passed. Then you notice the lightning and thunder seem to be coming from a different direction with less intensity. Finally your heart slows knowing the storm has passed and now you set about gathering your thoughts and reflecting on what had just happened.
Our 4 person tent stayed intact but we were all soaked and basically trapped on the sandbar in the ink black night. We just sat there wet and waiting for morning a few hours off. While not in any serious danger I began to wonder why I was there with my young children, on this beach with no practical way to navigate 4 miles back to a harbor in Red Wing in the middle of a stormy night. There was no chance of walking anywhere as the swampy Cannon River bottoms filled in more than a mile behind us. The lesson learned? Watch the weather and maybe pick a location with an alternative land egress.
The next time we made plans to spend a night over after a day of boating I decided to try a completely different approach. Instead of the tent on the beach we tried the Holiday Inn in Winona, MN. I’ll bet you’re not surprised if I say this was much more agreeable to Mary, and to me too. This experience set a new standard and one that I’m now going to relive 25 or more times in a row.
Each night of our trip we will stop at town with a motel, hotel, lodge, B+B or whatever you want to call it. In order to do this a few things are going to be required. Unlike in a car, you can’t just drive around until you see the bright Holiday Inn sign along the road. You have to know where the motels are ahead of time or have a means to find them in route. The boat adds another complication in that you need the services of a marina with transient dockage that'll allow a boat to be docked on a daily basis. Most marinas charge $1.00 per foot of boat so the Blue Fin comes in at $16/day. Not all marinas offer transient dockage so some investigative homework is in order here too. Once dockage and a motel are in hand another problem pops up. How do we get our belongings and ourselves from the marina to the motel? Can’t use the Blue Fin for that. We'll need a motel near to the marina. You see, this is all so simple! We just need a town with a motel, in close proximity to a marina that offers transient dockage.
Now before I go any further, I’ll add still one more complication. It’s a partially self-imposed complication in that I don’t want to, nor do I think it possible, to stick to a strict schedule of nightly stop-overs. The, don’t want to, part is just me. The, not possible, part is due to the unpredictability of each day’s journey. Remember what I said earlier about the lock-thru times at each dam? Those times will invariably throw a wrench into any plan to control our stop over destinations.
So how will we make this work for 21 days and 1700 miles? Easy, seat of the pants planning. You can toss out that linear planning your boss likes. That just won’t cut it here and I don't like that stuff anyway. That kind of planning says if you want a cold beer on Saturday you better put it in the fridge on Friday or you'll be drinking warm beer. Dumb Dumb Dumb. If you truly forget to put it in the fridge on Friday then execute a different plan. Go to the bar or a friends house on Saturday. Needless to say I prefer this thing I'll call conditional planning and if this term is new to the world then let me postulate a new theorem: Linear planning is for work, while conditional planning is for retirement.
Here's a beautiful example of what I'm trying to say. Have you ever heard of the IF-THEN-ELSE statement used in many programming languages? It’s always been one of my favorites and I’ll be putting it to good use on this trip. You use it all the time too but probably didn’t even know it had a name. Let me show you how it can work for my trip.
IF - a town has a marina
THEN - check if the marina has transient dockage.
ELSE - look for the next marina.
See, I told you that you use this sort of thought process all the time and I'm sure you think I’m an idiot for attempting to explain the obvious. But think what you want, I’m going to expand on this a bit further for no other purpose than to explain how I’ll plan my daily stops. And IF after that you just can’t get enough of the (if-then-else) statement, THEN take a class in the C++ programming language, ELSE you can just forget about it.
Here’s my decision process in action, picking out our nightly stop-over destinations:
IF - a town has a marina
THEN - check if the marina has transient dockage, ELSE – find the next marina
And IF – the marina has transient dockage
THEN check for a nearby motel, ELSE – find a different motel or marina
And IF – A motel is found nearby
THEN – Check if there’s a room, ELSE – find a different motel or marina
And IF - there’s a room
THEN - make a reservation, ELSE – chance it and just show up
OK, if your observant then you'll notice I was too lazy to make my little table catch every possibility. e.g. What if a motel is found in a town with a marina offering dockage but the motel is simply NOT nearby. Duh, then I’ll figure out how to get there. I'll tell you more about that later.
The first step in the decision tree requires me to find a town with a marina. How can I accomplish this? Between the Navionics navigation system and the smart phones we’ll always know where we are and how far it is to the next town.
Step two. Determine if transient dockage is available. How so? I can actually know this before I leave on our journey by doing some homework. I’ll use the old fashioned method and acquire a simple list of marinas ahead of time. There are a various resources available for this and Quimby’s is a popular publisher of a book with a lot of information. The bottom line; in one form or another I’ll have a list of all marinas with their services listed as well as their phone number, which by the way, doubles as a list of places to purchase fuel and incidentals too.
Step three is to check if a motel is nearby. I could do this the same way as I plan to deal with the marinas. That is, to have a list of known places in advance. I might do a bit of this but I've already discovered that if transient dockage is available then a motel is going to be available somewhere in the same town. How will I determine this for sure? Ask at the marina that’s providing my transient dockage, or use the smart phones to find a place, or hang out a the nearest bar and ask around.