Chapter 3: Day -1
And Apprehensive
It seemed like about half the mass of my overstuffed duffel bag was all the Dramamine I'd packed. Georgia had warned me that I could expect motion sickness for at least the first two days of the trip, and that I should probably start taking it a couple days before the trip started. I asked how many of these trips I'd have to go on before I got over it. She said "I don't know. I still get sick on the first day or two."
"But, wait a minute. You said you've done this dozens of times. You still get sick, even after all those trips?"
"Yeah, sure. It's just part of the trip."
I let the matter drop, and quietly realized that there wasn't a dictionary in the world that'd supply me with the definition of "fun" that Georgia was using.
Well, here we are, just before the trip is supposed to start. I'd been up to visit Georgia for New Year's Eve. While it wasn't a formal crew meeting, enough happened there that it does bear a small mention.
For starters, she played junior movie director, and with the help of Kathy, Tom Blocher, and your humble author, she helped us dispose of the whole first day of the new year shooting video for the trip tape. Nothing about the trip itself, just some generic scenes of getting up at some hour that's so horribly early in the morning that it's still called "last night", getting ready, and leaving in a rush, forgetting everything but the cats. It was fun. I got to play junior camera operator and Kathy and Tom got to star in the show.
We also got to see the "Sail 93" tee-shirts that we'll all be wearing. It would seem that Georgia got a few companies to sponsor our trip, and one of the conditions of said sponsorships was that we all prominently display the sponsor's logo while in port. Georgia, bless her heart, had found so many sponsors that the backs of the tee-shirts were almost completely filled in. As a matter of fact, they're so busy looking that they could easily pass for the back of one of those old Airstream trailers that's collected a nation's worth of bumper stickers.
Other than that, not much happened that's of any interest to the trip, except that Georgia sent me packing with that sail in my car's trunk and the generator in the back seat. Other than solving the mystery of the first couple of paragraphs of the introduction, this is pretty worthless information. I suppose it'd be a whole lot more interesting if I forgot to deliver them to the van, because that generator was to provide the electric power for the boat I was to be on.
Which gets us back to the day before the day before. I'll explain: Some people (particularly those who live on other continents) arranged to fly down to Ft. Lauderdale, which was our departure point. Others, like me, were flat broke already just from paying the entrance fee, so we were going to ride down in the vans.
Oh yeah, the vans. Transportation to Florida turned out to be a major pimple on the butt of this whole vacation. At first, we'd hoped to rent a couple of vans, until Georgia found out that there were no one way rentals, and that the round trip mileage plus the rental fees for the days the vans would just be sitting in the parking lot, would pretty well soak up most of the budget for the trip. In other words, we'd have boats, transportation, and nothing else. Airline tickets for everyone would have cost even more. So, for a while, we were thinking of arranging a flotilla of personal automobiles in a sort of "Carpool Across America."
Then, Georgia put her schmooze generators on full, and somehow managed to scam the use of a couple of Digital Commuter Vans for the trip. So, the idea was that we'd all meet at Dot & Ron Francey's house on Thursday evening, load up the two vans, and leave sometime around midnight. From there, we'd make various stops all along the eastern seaboard to pick the other trip members.
Thus, Thursday was "Day -1", with Friday ("Day 0"), being devoted to driving. The Thursday night festivities included eating lots of pizza. Those poor chumps had no idea what kind of a living hell the combination of my lactose intolerance and their pizza could make the interior of a van, but that was just my little surprise for them.
Sitting there, recording my thoughts for all mankind, I was overwhelmed by a sort of giddy anxiousness in anticipation of the trip, that could only be described as blind terror. Let's face it, I'd happily visit anywhere in the world, as long as I don't have to spend any time getting there, and as long as I can sleep in my own home every night. In other words, I rarely see anyplace that's farther away from New Hampshire than Montreal or New York City.
And now I was about to haul myself (and my luggage, and a generator, and a sail) onto a van, where I'd spend more than a full day sitting, and then, when I was really, really carsick, I'd get to climb onto a boat, that'd no doubt be rocking bobbing and swaying on all three axes. Once there, I'd get to help load the boats, try to look interested, and pray for the speedy passage of Dramamine into my bloodstream.
From there, I figured it'd all be downhill. I anticipated settling into a pretty regular schedule:
07:00 Wake up
07:30 Vomit
08:00 Eat breakfast
09:00 Hurl
09:30 Get my brains bashed out by the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean
11:30 Spew
12:00 Choke down lunch
13:00 Choke up lunch
13:30 Step all over anyone who is trying to productively sail the boat
16:30 Chunder
18:00 Stare my dinner down
19:00 Blow chunks
21:00 Try to stay awake during the evening watch
00:30 Puke
01:00 Retire to the aft berth where I'll fall asleep (or choke on my own vomit).
Well, gee, looking at that schedule, maybe I was being far too conservative when I bought that drugstore's entire supply of Dramamine. Maybe I should have done a couple more drugstores. Unlike some of the other people on the trip (Robert for instance) I had some idea of just how miserable this sailing business could be. By comparison, bungee jumping has to be a walk in the park. Overall, the whole sailing experience gets a score on my Discomfort Scale that's slightly worse than "French kiss both grandparents." In other words, sailing occupies that nether region of stupid human activity, that up until now, I had the good sense never to explore.
Sanity aside, most of us collected at Dot and Ron's, and nothing much of consequence happened there, other than a lot sitting around, trying to carry uncomfortable conversations with near total strangers. When I arrived, Ron and Dot were already there (naturally), as well as Paul Curtin and Rich June. Everyone else was supposed to show up around 11:00, which mostly meant that the five of us had all the pizza to ourselves.
And, pretty much as expected, Christian Brady and Christine Candee showed up, then Jean Pinard and Paul Meredith showed up, leaving us waiting for Bob Ericson to arrive.
Everyone was excited. To be precise, everyone else was excited in a happy anticipatory sort of way, and I was excited in a death-grip peristaltic sort of way. Our trip was to begin soon, and everyone wanted to get started, or at least get it over with.
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