It's Saturday, May 19. We're sitting at the welcome center part at Waterford, NY, waiting for the Erie Canal to open. It was closed to boat traffic last week so a break in the wall at lock 18 can be repaired. Lock 18 is 84 miles to the west of this location, a two day run from here, We expect the canal to open again on Wednesday. Tomorrow we are going to go about 10 miles west to Cresent Boat Club where we will meet a canvas man to do some repair work on our rear side curtains.
We had a great ride up the beautiful Hudson River. Highlight of the trip was a guided tour of West Point arranged by my sister's neighbor. We also visited FDR's home and the Vanderbilt Mansion. Both are run by the National Park Service so our "golden age cards" got us free access. The downer for the week was having Alltel turn off our phone due to their error. We couldn't call out and nobody could call in, they were charging us air time for all the time we are on the internet or e-mail. Our plan has unlimited internet access but the Alltel billing computer doesn't know how to log the time we use on this fancy bag phone system. I'm not sure we've got it worked out yet, but Alltel thinks we are calling our message center, when we are actually on the internet during those minutes. They think we spent 309 minutes checking messages last month.
My sister has turned around and is heading back south towards St. Michael's
