We had our usual Sunday morning breakfast today…..donuts and coffee and read the Sunday paper. There’s a small “Big Star” grocery store near the marina that has a bakery/deli and they make really good donuts. I also discovered that they have an early morning breakfast bar set up with sausage, scrambled eggs, grits and waffles. While I was there, about half a dozen men came in to get breakfast to go (in a brown bag and each had a pickup truck, wore blue jeans with a wide belt, a tight black T-shirt, and a plaid wool shirt. It’s like they had on the official local uniform, even though they clearly didn’t know each other.

Lots of people refer to people doing the Great Circle Route as Loopers……“Great Loop Route” is more common than “Great Circle Route”, I find. We learned from other Loopers that 2 locks further south between here and Mobile will be closed for maintenance from 11/14 through 11/20. One is at Pickensville and one at Coffeeville. The boat 2 slips down from us here at Grand Harbor marina is a local resident, but he’s taking his 65 ft. Marquis down to Orange Beach, AL just East of Mobile for the winter. He is leaving Wednesday to beat the lock closings and make it through to Mobile by 11/14. The couple we were cruising with on the Ohio are also going to speed up to beat the lock closings. However, we’ve decided to stick with our original plan which will take us through the Pickensville lock before 11/14 and will leave us stuck between locks for the one week in and around Demopolis. We can stay at Demopolis and cruise the Black Warrior river if we want. Then we can pass the Coffeeville lock after 11/20. Kathy says she read that a number of cruisers bring their boats down to Demopolis to spend the winter, so there should be good boat facilities. As long as they don’t discover more problems once they start working on the Coffeeville lock and decide to close it longer, this fits our schedule fine.

So we decided to stay another day here at Grand Harbor and look at real estate, just for fun. Since we’re now far enough south that people don’t have to winterize their boats, it’d be interesting to consider either having a home or a condo with a boat dock down here. We were directed to a local real estate mogul……actually the guy that built this huge marina and condo property. He gave us 3 hours of his time and drove us all around the area, showing us many of the possibilities, plus he has lived here all of his life and is a fount of information on the area. We saw homes and empty lots with spectacular views (like the one of 3 states out of our front windshield below) and got an excellent understanding of the area from this gentleman. No sales pitch at all, even tough many of them were his properties. We did see 2 beautiful lots right on the water in a beautiful cove, out of the waves, for about $500K. They are in a new fancy sub-development. Kathy says if we ever do buy a new house, she wants a bare lot so she can design it herself. We both think we’re most likely to stay in Illinois and just bring the boat south in the winters. But it was fun to look and we had the perfect host to show us around. We may do the same thing further south too, so we can compare.