Friday 21 November 2014

Beyond Halloween...

Steve Madden (from M Yacht Services) and his wife Wendy  
were kind enough to invite us to their home for Halloween
Arriving, they had the front of their property looking great...



The children, and parents that came knocking on the door were gorgeous,
All dressed up… We had many Ninjas, The Simpsons, Wonder Woman,  Little Policemen.  





Wendy had made us Roast Lamb for dinner, we had a great night of wonderful food, free flowing wine and great company!

We had spent one month in Annapolis.
Our Rose had all the jobs completed on her that we had organized (thank you to M Yacht Services)…

We reprovisioned to overflowing, taking the opportunity of having an address for a month and stocked up on filters, cleaning products and anything else we had found hard to source, then finally it was time to move on.

We anchored at a spot at Solomons Islands.  We walked to the Annie Marie Gardens and Sculture.



There was an art exhibition on showing “edible” type art - the first two are both "knotted" fabric




This mural is made out of plastic bottles…



The sculpture gardens were great, with lots of artistic bird houses




And many other sculptures, 








including this “miniture” park bench in a playhouse



We dropped anchorage at a beautiful spot in Irvington…




We walked to the local vineyard and had a winetasting



While in Irvington we bought insulation to wrap around our hot water cylinder – it is certainly cooling down!

It is now getting extremely cold.



This is "ice" in the bottom of our dinghy.  






Washington DC

We were so lucky that a friend of Beryls – Ann called and invited us to join her for a day of custom Site-Seeing.

Ann picked us up in her car at Arlington Cemetary… where we began.

Arlington is a military cemetery, now the resting place for over 400,000 people, 
one of these being Ann’s late husband



Whilst there, we saw a horse-drawn caisson, carrying an American flag-draped casket.  We stopped to pay respect as the lone bugler played the 24 lingering notes of Taps, and the 21 gun salute




We went to the final resting place of John F Kennedy and Jacqui Onassis Kennedy



A lot of the places we went were quite surreal, having seen them in movies



The view from Arlington House, The Robert E Lee Memorial was beautiful



We then went to the Kennedy Arts Centre Building...




They had flags of the states and flags of the world
- we were amazed that the NZ flag was so prominent!..





The DC Cathedral, which took 83 years to build was amazing


with beautiful stained glass throughout





We are extremely grateful to Ann for a wonderful day.