Freedom Floats Again, and it's for the Ta Ta's...

 The last week has been a whirl wind of selling the condo, moving into storage, driving South, acquiring driver's licenses and registrations, and launching Freedom. It should have taken a month. But we managed to get all of this done in 6 days.
 But she is afloat, rather grudgingly but she is floating. The crew here at River Forest Labelle did a great job with class equipment getting her in the water. And that is where the fun stopped.
 The main engine batteries were not properly charged because well, the boat was not plugged in enough. Even though we paid for it, the boat was down on charge. Fortunately the port engine spun up as usual but the starboard engine needed help from the house bank. I'm really glad I decided to put in a switch to combine the house bank with the starting banks when I installed the inverter. It was the first time I had to use it and it payed many dividends. Tomorrow we will see if the charger will manage to pump life back into the starting bank. Once tied up at the dock we learned that the satellite tv tracking system went down and needs to be replaced, not fixed. But the real pain showed up when the Radar Chart Plotter we had upgraded by Furuno died. All of this adds up to quite a bit of concern given the itinerary we normally ply. So when we move to Stuart tomorrow, hopefully we don't learn more about what failed over the Summer.
 That's the bad and it probably isn't done showing itself yet.
 The good? She started up, moved out of the slings, spun around smartly and pulled into her new slip running smoothly. She even revved up a bit without complaint. Next time I will remember to turn on the fuel valves. Yes, I did that. I forgot to open the supplies to both engines. But she ran long enough anyway. I'm not sure what that says about the valves but I am sure glad they ran given all of the expensive hardware in the marina right now. Freedom is nothing but a glass bauble in comparison.
 Anyway, before we arrived here at Freedom we stopped in at Green Cove Springs to register the car, acquire our driver's licenses, and register the boats in Florida. It was probably the best experience I have ever had with any department of motor vehicles. Florida really has it's act together. You bring your papers of identity etc. and they enter it into the system. If you qualify the job is done. It took the nice lady named Geri two hours to get all of our processing done. And she worked diligently all that time, non stop.
 And, she did it with a smile, spoke perfect English, and in spite of all the non stop work, she remained professional and courteous. Now for the fun part. You may be wondering about the title of this particular entry in the blog.
 All the while I was standing in front of a glass divider that had one of those holes you pass information through. On the outside of the divider there were cancer walk-a-thon cards stuck up with tape filled out by donors.
 One of them stood out. I kind of laughed to myself without being too obvious but Geri noticed  being the sharp lady she is. She could not read the writing because the card was taped to the outside of her window facing out. So she's typing away and I draw Deb's attention to that particular card. She leans in, reads it and starts laughing.
 Now Geri is really getting nervous and wondering just what is so special about this card that was stuck to her window. She can't read it and obviously never looked at it prior to the contributor sticking it up.
 Being a good sport I waited about 15 minutes and eventually bust out laughing. Deb and I kind of outwardly didn't hide the notion that this was on her window and would be embarassing, but we didn't tell her promptly and let it fester for a while. But then it happened. Yes, I bust out laughing because the cancer walk-a-thon card had an in memory heading filled in with "It's for the ta ta's" along with an anonymous contributor. At the point I fell apart laughing Geri in calm Florida Cracker demanded to  know what that card said. So I peeled if off her window and turned it so she could read it. It was a moment of controlled astonishment for her but being a good sport she shared it with all of her coworkers.
 It was a good moment.
 Having been there, through all of this, she asked if we would be organ donors and we said yes, we will. In spite of all the time spent standing outside her window, it went very well, and we all had a great time.
 And tomorrow we move to Stuart traveling across the State of Florida.