Saturday, August 26, 2017 – A family visit
This morning started out early for me as usual but with limited number of hours of sleep but I have a list of food to start getting ready because my younger portion of my family are arriving today, my son, nephew, niece with their significant others. My son has gotten used to visiting me as another adventure in our lives, this is the second island he has visited me on and his only concern was the weather going to get him stuck on Seguin. He visited me on Nantucket for a weekend and the weather stranded him out there for 5 days. The good news is the weather is perfect and I get to see one of my favorite groups of young people.
Today should be a quiet day without a delivery of the Seguin Island Ferry and schools have started almost everywhere so a lot less vacationers. Hopefully with the light load of visiting I will have a chance to play catch up with my guys. We started out slowly with a few visits from the boats who stayed overnight in the cove. Again, another chance to catch up with some cruising friends.
The kids were due to arrive at 11:15 so Brian and I went down to get the dinghy ready to greet everyone and get them and their belongings ashore. They actually traveled lightly except for the cooler of microbrew beers, but the good news on the island I don’t have to worry about them drinking and driving, not much harm can come to them here. The cousin group gets together once or twice a year but the laughter is still the same at every visit and it reminds me of the sleepovers with everyone at my house when they were growing up.
Once we got everyone settled and gave them a tour of the tower, my son and nephew were good enough to carry a 5-gallon water container up the hill for us. A lot of good hearted complaining until I reminded them their 53-year-old mom carries one up every other day. Then they all set off to explore the eastern side of the island, and even as they were out exploring, I could hear their laughter all the way up on the front porch, a happy mom/aunt memory.
I had a chance to sit down with all of them during lunch and play catch up with each of their lives. The downfall of our wanderlust lifestyle is not getting a lot of chances to talk face to face with them and find out how their adulting is going. As we were sitting around chatting, a group of people started coming up the hill, as I went to greet them I found out it was a group of 75 people from a Brunswick church group, OK, this is going to change our late afternoon plans for a family dinner. As Brian and I started to give tours and get everyone settled, the kids all headed off to the North Trail. The church group makes this outing every year and usually has a family type picnic and a shorter service at the base of the tower. Once Brian and I had everyone up to the top, the group settled down for their meals and I went in to start dinner prep for my group and as I walked around to the porch, I saw a pod of whales swimming by the island on the eastern shore, so back to the group to let them know of the sighting.
I started the homemade pizza dough for pizza night and was getting ready for dinner for 7 when my nephew returned to let us know there were a group of teenage boys climbing the tram and scaffolding around the Whistle house. Brian went to the Tram and I went down to the Whistle House to police the boys and asked them to return to their church group. Now we needed to keep them safe, but like Brian said, when he was a kid their age, he would have been doing the exact same thing if the opportunity presented itself, how perspectives change over time.
We had a great pizza night and ran up to the top of the tower in time to see the sunset which was a little less than spectacular. Brian without us knowing about had set up the sunset cannon, so as 6 of us are on the tower, we heard ‘fire in the hole’ and boom! I knew what was going on but the kids just might have had their heart rate increase substantially!
All in all, what a great day. As everyone headed off to bed exhausted from sun and hiking, I looked down to the place I keep my shoes to see a pile of theirs added to it, again a good warm feeling of adventurous mom/aunt!
Guests today – 96
Guests total – 2396
USCG – 6 (I guess this is a final tally)
