March 1 -- not according to plan

Well, the plan for today was to go out for a bike ride then go for a boat ride ... which got all messed up.

It was warm and windy -- over 70 and winds at 15 mph gusting to 20 mph from the SE, so I biked south to the new radar installation on Merritt Island (25 miles) and turned around. It was clear sailing on the way back with that tailwind. I was a little late starting (7:45) as I played around with attaching my rain jacket to the bottom of my seat wedge -- rain was in the forecast.

I got home a little after 10:30 and we got ready to go boating -- I grabbed a sandwich and we brought a cooler with some drinks and fruit. Watching us get the boat ready (tarp off, hooked up) Abby wanted to be sure that she was not left behind. We then went to the 7-11 and filled up the boat gas tank.

In the Canavaral National Seashore park, we launched the boat ... no problems so far, parked the car ... and I realized that I had left the boat key at home. Sandy didn't want to wait with the boat, but nor could she drive the car and trailer etc. back home, so I went back for the key and she waited. This should have been our premonition that this was not meant to be ...

Back at the park with the key, finally, I started the boat ... not. It wouldn't start. Luckily I had charged the battery over the last few days ... perhaps. It finally started but wouldn't stay running. Lots of black smoke. Groan.

Back home with the boat, I hooked up the muffs to flush the cooling system and after some playing around, got water running through it. I pulled the spark plugs -- they were wet but relatively clean. The only way that I could keep it running was to keep hitting the choke. Not good.

So ... I looked in the yellow pages, found a place on the North Causeway, just a couple of miles away, and hopefully they will be able to look at it in the next couple of days. I'd like to go out next week and we're hoping to go out with Jason when he is here the following week. The guy at the repair place said that it is probably the carburetor, given the symptoms.

Since we were not going boating, we went for a long walk with Abby to explore the park area about one mile north of us on Saxon towards the inland waterway. The paths back there are like a jungle and eventually you find a deck by some open water -- probably Calalisa Creek, as it's called where it goes under the South Causeway.

Back home I installed a software trial package called Parallels on the Mac Laptop that is supposed to allow me to run Windows XP in a window while the Mac OS is also running. After a few tries I got XP loaded and then did the upgrade to SP2 -- but failed to load Quicken or rather after loading Quicken, it said that files were corrupted. I don't know whether that is because the copy that I have is corrupted or whether there is some issue with the Parallels setup. I don't have the original Quicken CD here -- it's up north. I want to be able to access Quicken when I'm on the cross country bike ride to manage our finances, pay bills etc. since I'll be travelling for about 6 weeks. I have two other options -- run XP "native" on the Mac, which involves purchasing a retail copy of XP -- expensive for the little use that I'm going to have for it -- or use Quicken on the Mac -- which involves doing some file conversion. No conclusions yet ...

For the ride -- Nutrition -- 1.25 water bottles; cliff bar at 20 miles; Ride stats -- 50 miles; 17.3 mph avg.