Sept 12 It was norms grand opening today so we headed there in time for the 10am opening in case we could be useful. Norm was at the airport collecting a Philippines shipment of fish which China Air had kindly held up for 24 hours so nobody had high hopes of any arriving alive. We chatted to the staff and a few customers even managing to sell one of our aminos to one lol after the threats to poison their tanks from a rival store we also patrolled the aisles ju...

Sept 11 We had all sorts of plans for today until we realised the date, Sept 11th. We made the mistake last time of being in the city on that date and couldn't do much of what we wanted due to memorial services etc so we dropped all plans but meeting up with Randy in Brooklyn at the Pratt Institute. Traffic was mostly not too bad, heavy but moving and the usual crazy once actually in NYC. Pete decided the best defence was to drive like a New Yorker, it got a bi...

We slept late waking to a constant drizzle & a big temp drop. Yesterday it was 38, today 23. We got to take a good look around our home for the next few days and found we are on a very picturesque part of the Long Island Sound. We took it slow heading first to Enterprise Cars to re-do the contract. Even though we have the car for two months they want us to re-sign at the one month point which passed while in DC and not practical to do from there. A quick tr...

Sept 9 We got up at 9 so we could go for breakfast which was really good then returned to our room to do some work, place orders for the store, pay bills etc The view from our upgraded water view room was pretty nice. Per our arrangement of last night we went down to reception at midday to hook up with Michelle and Craig. They finally got there at one, they'd gone back to sleep after breakfast. While we waited the coolest dog wearing sunglasses came in with h...

Sept 8 After a late night (early morning?) photographing some of the monuments we got up at ten and began to try to make some sense of the masses of freebies and purchases not to mention the rest of our luggage. A couple of pieces of fruit each and we got the car loaded up and set off by 11.30. DC traffic was pretty heavy and the going a bit slow. After dodging the toll roads around Baltimore by going through the slow traffic in the city we decided to suck it u...