and something else

Regarding donations: We appreciate all the donations we have recieved. Since we have decided to stop here in St. Charles we are willing to give back any donations we've recieved, or we'll use it to rent a car to get back to the Quad Cities, and curb our overall losses.

We are now looking for a good home for our raft. It will be a platform with paddle wheels and hatches throughout. It can be hauled out if you have a trailer, or towed anywhere you'd like. Please, if anyone is interested in a mobile swimming dock, or pontoon-type boat, please email us and let us know.

We've started writing our end of the trip postcards, so if we've met you and you forgot to give us your address, you should send it on over and we'll send you one too.

Its unbelievable how amazing everyone has been, how positive and inspiring. We'll be thinking about it all for a long long time. Thank you.

So we have started to take her apart. The owner of the harbor has offered us the showerhouse to sleep in, with a back room and heat. We've been staying warm in Bill's boat (where we've been tied up for the past month) and in Jamie and Dave's boat, when the campfires have not been warm enough to keep us through the nights. It's 13 degrees right now and the wind is gusting 15 to 20mph. But yesterday we successfully moved out of the harbor during the few hours it was warm enough to break up the ice. Only paddlewheels moving us again into the slough. But oh it's frozen in now. Tied up to the rocks but with little on it. We'll be taking the walls down tomorrow and hopefully relocating them to the farm to become an outdoor kitchen? oh boy.

It's been amazing here. People are so wonderful, it feels wrong to be leaving at all. But we'll have to come back to find a home for the platform and paddlewheels once the river is soft enough to move her again. Thankgoodness for that.

Conceding Defeat

It has been weeks.

And although we excelled in the areas of solar panels, batteries, moral support, water containers, and stoves, the motor we needed came too late. Too late to spend unknown money for an unknown journey which the Coast Guard deemed crazy, impossible and forbidden.

That warning actaully just got us fired up more, they can't tell us its too cold to be on the river, they can't scare us. But after the harbor froze, and indecision continued on and on, the momentum surely abated.

Andrew and Patty came down to help finish the journey with us, and we moved up to the North Shore Oasis in St. Charles. Incredibly, amazingly, lovingly, supportive and hospitable. After a week we were three, not four, and though the campfires were warm and beautiful, and the karaoke and beer was flowing through us, the cold, the snow, the ice persisted.

We have conceded defeat.