Burntside Adventures: Demopolis

We are finally back on the boat. Left Ely at 2 am on Wednesday morning, Sept 9, drove to Duluth and cabbed to the airport from Hermantown Storage where the car is parked for the fall. The flights and connections all went well, even had time for a good burger and beer at the Atlanta Airport. We rented an Enterprise car in Birmingham to get us the last 100 miles and Demopolis, where we arrived at 4 pm, so a 14 hour trip door to door. The boat was a mess. Dirty and covered with spiders and spider shit on every horizontal surface. Felt like a horror movie at times, but the inside was nice and clean. We cranked up the air conditioning. It was in the 90's with high humidity, and cleaned up the back deck so we could at least get on and off the boat without tracking in debris. Then made a quick run to Walmart for enough groceries to get us through the next morning. Then crashed. We were both toasted. Thursday we spent the day cleaning the boat and mad another run to Walmart for definitive provisioning. I had read online about spiders, spider shit and how to get things cleaned up. Other boaters use a cleaner called Spray 9. It works pretty well, melting the stains and scrubbing with a long handled boat brush. It took most of the day to get things presentable, but all is cleaned now and any residual stain is going to get bleached out by the sun. The next chore was to deal with the rental car. The initial reservation was to pick up at the Birmingham airport and drop off at the Demopolis Enterprise. Birmingham confirmed that Demopolis was closed due to the virus and we would have to drop the car off somewhere else. The nearest location was Meridian, Mississippi, 60 miles away. The marina dockmaster suggested we contact Western Alabama Public Transport. They run a bus to various towns in rural Alabama including Meridian, so Friday morning we drove to Meridian, dropped off the car and met the bus at the Meridian train depot for a ride back to Demopolis. They were right on time and it all worked out. We ate out at Kora's Place in Demopolis, run by a very religious black family and had a great burger, generic fries and no beer, sadly. Yesterday Cindy hiked to downtown Demopolis and worked the thrift stores picking up a bunch of treasures, so she's happy. I worked on more boat maintenance. All is done except for the vacuflush toilet repair I have to complete. It needs a new pump housing which I ordered and is here, but before I disassemble the system, we need a pump out, which they can't do until tomorrow morning, Monday. It's not a huge job, just a little unpleasant. Once that is done, we are ready to move on Tuesday morning if tropical storm Sally allows us. Right now it looks like a big rain event and some wind. We'll see.