We Made It To The Boat!!

Hello everyone! Yes, we did make it to the boat (June 26)!!! PLAN: Wake up early, work like crazy to clean the apartment for the next tenants, pack the final bag, hit the road around 10am arrive to the boat in Anacortes at 5pm, unpack essentials, relax with a sundowner cocktail on our new home. Yay! REALITY: Do you remember weaving those little pot holders as a kid? The weaving was straight forward but then you had to loop each loose end through the other so it would hold together? Well, that was our day. Beginning at 6am after falling into it at nearly 2am, we moved the bed out, then vacuumed, gave that away to my best friend, loaded the bed into our son’s car, then completed the move out cleaning for the tenant arriving in a few days. The thing about being the landlord and the move out tenant is that you have to clean and repair! Seriously, who has to replace the fan light, put in new flooring, re-caulk the bathroom and change the shower faucet, and spackle patch and paint as part of the move out process? Anyway, thanks to Bill’s brother we were able to secure all of those loose ends, get a shower, have lunch, and hit the road at 2pm. We arrived just after 9 pm (10pm Missoula time). The weather was good and everything went smoothly except that new whining noise the car started making just after Seattle. We checked the temperature, no warning lights, I stuck my head out the window, no funny smell…… Maybe it had something to do with the U-Haul trailer? We will figure it out in the morning. We were looking forward to just falling into bed after that long day.
The boat is currently “on the hard” as mariners say. This means we are parked in a gravel parking lot of boats. It requires climbing a ladder 11 feet up to get on the boat. We stepped aboard to find the laundry machine in the Saloon (living room), not one job completed after being here since Jan 26, and a disaster of a construction zone. OMG! We managed to find the heater (inside temp 55 degrees), some bedding, we unwedged our pillows from the car (Bill thought of putting those in near the top) and slept like babies until we needed to pee.
The toilet on a boat goes into what is called a holding tank. Our tank is 60 gallons and once it is full the toilet cannot be used until the tank is emptied. To do so, you have to go to a pump out station at a marina. I woke up and started thinking all of this through in my head. How full is our tank? When did we empty it last? Can you pump out while sitting in a gravel lot? How long will we be in this gravel lot? I decided against using our toilet. Option two: use the porta potty at the far end of the lot about 200 yards away. I wonder how long we will be in this gravel lot!