To see as much of the world as we can,
Using the smallest carbon footprint we can,
Spending the least amount of money we can,
Making as many friends we can.

Team Red Cruising

Apartment Move-In

Moving from boat to apartment is awfully easy. There's some shame, however, because we we're fully prepared. We spent our first week in Richmond living in a hotel because the apartment wasn't ready. Friday, CA moved us into our new berth in Exchange Place.

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The boat requires no furniture, just a few clothes and personal items. Leaving the boat means that almost everything we need — galley, clothes, miscellaneous stuff — fits in the the trunk of a car. A few things were forgotten on Red Ranger.

CA did the entire move by herslf in a few hours. No calling friends and bribing them with pizza. We don't know very many people here in Richmond. We could try and call Brooke and Susan of Liquid Therapy, but they're not back from their summer Chesapeake cruise. And there was so little stuff to move, they would have done it in two trips and then hit the bars. Without me.

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We haven't needed many things over the last two years. We've been using less and less as time went by. One of CA's big tasks when we got to Deltaville was to remove yet more things from the boat that we hadn't used in the last year.

Now we've got a 1BR apartment, which is so much more spacious than Red Ranger that we're having trouble coping. And, there's the shame factor.

What do we do with all that empty floor space? All that walking around is killing me. Red Ranger's head was two steps from the aft berth. Two short steps. The pass-through from aft berth to galley was all of 6′: the length of the cockpit. It was four steps: right, left, right, and left goes a few inches up to the saloon deck. Yes. When it's only four steps, it becomes like karate kata or dance: do it just this way and no other way. (And yes, it should have been left-right-left-right to use the flat spot in the pass-through for that first step, but I couldn't seem to train my left foot to go first.)

We have a few plans to fill all the empty floor space. We need a couple of bar stools for the countertop in the galley.

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We expect that we'll probably buy a love seat or something. And perhaps a television.

So far, so good.

We'll probably find some shelf unit thing for the closet. Ikea makes stuff that we can make use of. Except.

The. Tools. Are. On. The. Boat.

The shame! The shame of having to buy tools to assemble Ikea furniture. Ikea sells a "Fixa" which might be useful for assembly and cheaper than a drive to Deltaville for tools. Or. It could be a cruel joke because it doesn't have some required tool like a properly-sized hex key.

This weekend there will be no cruising with Red Ranger. We'll be getting a mattress, shelves, and a pressure cooker. CA has an "A" list of the essentials that must be duplicated between boat and apartment. Things like pans are going to be duplicared. She's been mastering the kind of cruising cuisine that minimizes cookware use.

Galley knives raise a difficult problem: cheap knives are an accident waiting to happen. A second set of good knives may mean spending too much. Schlepping knives back and forth between apartment and boat may be the solution. Professional chefs do it.

She's got a "B" list, too, where items like televisions live. These are things that aren't essential. It's helpful to go slow and confirm the need before spending money on something that seemed like a good idea but (a) didn't get used much, and (b.1) had to be moved to the next apartment, or (b.2) had to be disposed of when moving back aboard.

Next weekend is July 4th. Where will we go? We could go to Norfolk for the fireworks. Or. Perhaps someplace secluded and quiet like Onancock.