Jammin Jane Travels: Days 3-5: Petoskey sent us lots of love

Sawyer loves to snuggle and I'm happy to help!

Ben has planned the trips for our cruising to be five hours or shorter when possible. This is for both Sawyer and myself. I can only sleep so much! But seriously, I can't read for too long or blog as it makes me sleepy and a bit nauseous. Looking at my phone for more than a few minutes isn't worth the icky feeling either. So, I take in the scenery, run down and make a little lunch (today deli sandwhiches...not my fav but easy underway) chat with Ben, take pictures and cuddle with Sawyer. Ben on the other hand planned our course and navigates our trip. He runs down to the engine room to do a quick check a couple times (depending on length of our journey) and mans the wheel. Most of the time he uses our auto pilot so he isn't having to work the wheel for four hours. Sawyer has done great so far, he is pretty chill most of the time but tends to get a bit antsy around hour four, which is typical for a puppy. So, we are all happy to make our trips shorter and enjoy the towns a bit more.

Ben is lucky, he doesn't get sleepy or nauseous while reading

Good Boy Sawyer, taking another nap

Our run to Petoskey took us four hours, arriving around 1:15. We topped off our diesel before heading to our slip. While we both prefer to stay in Harbor Springs, Petoskey is a great stop for food and shopping. Because it is a fairly long walk and all uphill to get into town, it makes the hot pretzel we "had" to try an easy decision..."we'll walk it off!" All other genre of shopping i.e.: grocery store, auto store, big box stores...etc are located a couple miles further in town. We planned two nights here to do some laundry and a dinghy ride to Harbor Springs for some shopping and cookies from Tom's Moms! Sooooo Yummy! However the weather ended up keeping us here a third day.

I do not think the dozen cookies Ben bought is going to make it past a week!

We sure felt the love while in Petoskey...
Friends who keep their boat here offered us their car for some grocery shopping, wine (we forgot at home), a pillow for Ben and a stop at Walgreens. Thank you to Blue Chip! We enjoyed stopping by their boat as they have an eight week old labrador puppy!! How lucky are we??
The next day while I was doing laundry I thought I saw someone I recognized walk past the window, sure enough it was Denise and Paul from the boat Zephyr. We met them while doing The Great Loop three years ago. They were part of our fleet of six boats that crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Panama City, FL to Clearwater. Denise and Paul gave us some ideas for restaurants in town. It was great to catch up! How lucky do we feel now??
This same day we loaded into our dinghy and were just starting to make our way across Little Traverse Bay to Harbor Springs when we heard someone call out our names..."who the heck would know us here??" I said as Ben turned us around in time to see my best friends son, Cameron, jumping in the water to come see us. Cam is a Marine on break with his buddies, we did not know he was here nor did he know our plans. We only got to talk briefly but it was so great to get a hug and tell him how proud we are of him and his service! Pretty cool! I do not believe in coincidences, rather people are put in our lives for reasons. For all this love in Petoskey, we feel blessed!!