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Dear Friends at the Shawnee Boat Club in Portsmouth, OH,

There are so many of you who welcomed us and helped us when we landed at the city ramp in Portsmouth. We were not able to connect with anyone in Portsmouth ahead of arrival so we took the chance that there would be room in the inn and paddled a total of 24.5 miles to get to what looked like a place we could pull out. Thankfully, earlier that day we had had the chance to rest and shower at a boat club upriver. But we were still hoping for some restrooms and showers in Portsmouth that evening.

We pulled up on the ramp that turned out to be part of city campground. After asking who we might speak to about camping there we were directed to Pat in the golf cart. She squeezed us both into the front seat and showed us where we might pitch a tent and use a crude toilet. Unfortunately, there were no showers. But she was kind enough to bring us over to the Shawnee Boat Club right next door to introduce us to you folks and we fell in love. Of course, the promise of hot showers helped that love grow! We were invited, against the general rules of the club, to paddle the canoe to your docks so we were happy for Pat to take us back to our canoe and we did just that.

We paid our $15 docking fee, wondering if ever a canoe had docked there with the big party boats before! We had scarcely started unloading when a hand reached out to help us, in fact, to INSIST on helping us. That’s how we met you, Christine. Thank you, for all that you and Larry did for us. You made Portsmouth our favorite layover. You awed us with the pride you have in your small, struggling river town, sitting along the Ohio like a Medieval fortress with its huge flood walls. This was the first time paddling that we saw so many of these walls and realized the peril that your towns await several times throughout the year when the waters threatened to swell over the riverbanks.

We met your police officers and learned of the drug problems in your town as it struggles to keep its identity in changing times. But the pride was so strong that we have no doubt that you will weather the times just as you have weathered centuries of change before. We were so thrilled to ride on your jazzed up golf cart, clinging to the poles as Larry zoomed (yeah, I know he probably wasn’t even going 5 miles an hour but next to our canoe it felt like zooming) through the streets of the town with what seemed like everyone waving greetings to you with the two strange women hanging onto the back. Hey, when you are going to get seatbelts for that thing?

It was great to go to your favorite BBQ pit, The Ribber, and it was so kind of you to buy us ribs which we enjoyed that night and the next. People downriver where we stayed the next night knew the Ribber well. I was thinking it is interesting that they knew a restaurant a whole day’s journey upriver and then realized that by car it was about 30 minutes. Perspective is interesting on the river.

The beautiful murals on the flood walls were so realistic, depicting generations of life in Portsmouth. You insisted we visit with your friends on the deck of the boat club and we loved telling our story and hearing theirs. What an interesting contrast for us paddlers to meet the man who races speed boats professionally.

And then you were so thoughtful to bring us oatmeal from McDonalds the next morning. And it was very good. I loved it when you said: “I figured you to be health conscious so I brought oatmeal!” Yes, we get out on the river every day but did we ever confess to you that we manage in no small way by indulging in a Snickers bar every afternoon? That is a habit that some may not believe did NOT start with me. Karen insists and I have come to enjoy it quite a lot.

You made it impossible for us to ever forget Portsmouth, OH. You made us promise to go see the movie 42 which I have heard from others is excellent. Branch Rickey, who signed on Jackie Robinson, was from Portsmouth. And you may have read on Facebook that my sister reminded me that she went to school in our hometown of Elmira, NY, with Rickey’s grandchild! Small world, eh? And, of course, we will not forget that Roy Rogers was from Portsmouth as well. I haven’t seen 42 yet, but I will let you know when I do!

I am sure that I am leaving out some of the details of that wonderful evening. Of course, we did have a great place to camp and wake up to a wonderful view of the river AND we took a shower both in the evening and in the morning, bought ice for the day, and headed out, refreshed of heart, body and soul.

Thank you to you all for your kindnesses and encouragement.

Sincerely,
Maggie

Dear Barb,

It was great to meet you, Ronnie and Randy at the Holiday Point Boat Club. We were so hot and dirty when we paddled into your little cove. I had called you some miles upriver to see if you had showers and ice and you said YES. Hallelujah! We were so sticky from the sweat and humidity of the night and day before with layers of sunscreen and bug repellent as well as ground in river grime. First thing we did before even finding you was find our way to the showers and it was heavenly. Then when I came to find you at the docks, you said we could pay for the ice ($1) but not the showers. You were so encouraging to me about our trip. Thanks. And I hope that you have looked up our blog and maybe you will even read this post.

As we paddled out, I remembered that I had forgotten to ask you about the strange UFO looking thing at the entrance to the cove so I called you and you explained that it was a concrete boat built by a guy some decades ago who wanted to prove that it would float. What a story you told including the fact that it was used as a speak easy on the water for the locals from the “dry” side of the river.

Well, we have depended on the kindness of people like you throughout our adventure down the rivers. As with those before, you graced us with your hospitality and encouragement.

Again, many thanks for being an oasis in our day.

Sincerely,

Maggie

PS: Hope your back is healing well from you surgery. Maybe you can lift a bag of ice now?

Dear Billie,

We set off Sunday morning after a great night’s sleep in the Holiday Inn in Huntington. Chris sent us off from the sinking barge with our first full day of paddling in front of us. We didn’t know for sure how far we would or could paddle but we set our eyes on the Worthington (WV) Boat Club which was on the list of boat clubs I had downloaded from the web. We tried calling ahead but the phone was disconnected. We decided we would still hope that we could camp there and maybe even get a shower. I told Karen that if no one was there, we could just camp and if anyone asked what we were doing, we could just say Bill told us we could camp there. I figured that there had to be a Bill at the boat club!

We pulled into the boat club after paddling for 23 miles. It didn’t look occupied when we paddled in and many of the boats looked old and unused. We noticed the plants growing out of some of the propellers! I guess I gave you quite a surprise when I finally got your attention above the music you were playing while relaxing on your houseboat. After your initial “where did YOU come from?” you jumped out of the boat and came with me to meet Karen. I had to suppress a laugh when you introduced yourself as Billie Christie! So, there was a Bill there? We weren’t quite sure what to make of your next question: “Are you packing?” Of course, I initially thought you were referring to our gear but soon realized that you meant a gun! Maybe next year we will consider that! I guess a lot of people think two middle aged women canoeing in southern Ohio, West Virginie and Kentucky SHOULD be armed.

You were quick to welcome us and suggest we camp up the stream. Thanks for guiding us on your kayak to the small dock where we could tie up. However, the abundance of poison ivy took us back to the boat club where you showed us to a little peninsula that we unofficially camp on. You offered your sickle which was a little scary to me that you even had one with you but I soon understood that we could use it to knock down the weeds. Though I did consider that we might want THAT to be our weapon.

Thank you for letting us stay there and finding us a nice camping spot and for bringing us that bundle of firewood even though it was hotter than Hades that night! You truly did how us southern hospitality. Sorry we didn’t see you again after that…would have loved to tell you the story of thinking the flopping sounds in the water all night were the beavers or muskrats you warned us about. Turns out that the full moon brings out the fish and they flop out of the water all night reaching toward the moon…or someone downriver told us later in the trip! Between the fish and the hot, humid night, we didn’t sleep very well but we were glad for a place to pitch our tent.

Thanks again for your kindnesses. And while we couldn’t figure out how to turn on the water for showers, there was enough water in the toilet tanks to give us one more opportunity without using the wild before we headed out the next morning!

Sorry I didn’t get a photo of you but I’ll include here a photo of some of the boats and a photo from inside our tent as the sun rose.

Best wishes,
Maggie

PS: I just learned that Worthington has only 158 residents!

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Dear JR, Dave, Davey and Chris,

Thanks, JR, for helping me over the phone and letting us pull up our canoe at the marina in Huntington. I never met you in person because when we got there at around 6:30 pm, we met Dave and Davey who were spending the night on the barge and seemed happy to see something interesting come along like two crazy women in a canoe! They were very helpful.

Dave and Davey, thanks for helping us unload the canoe and pulling it up on the dock. And thanks for making sure all our gear was safe for the night. I have to say, we were a bit confused at the idea of you two city employees spending the whole night on that barge just so that it would not sink. I was fascinated by the room you showed me with the pumps pumping the water out. We are wondering how long you will have to keep watch!

Davey, thanks for the tour of the city and for driving us to the Holiday Inn. After getting showers, we walked around the city and ate at Max and Erma’s. Wow, do they ever have great hamburgers! They I got ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery. I don’t know how Karen resisted that temptation.

The next morning we walked back to the barge and found that Chris was on the watch for keeping the barge from sinking that morning. He was expecting us and helped us take a gear back to the canoe and get the canoe in the water.

You all helped make our first day and night out on the river a great success. You really showed us Southern hospitality, and the city should be proud to have you as city employees!

Thanks again…and best wishes with that barge…we’ll be watching the news on that!

Maggie

I received a beautiful thank you letter from my  niece Rachel yesterday.  It gave me an idea.  Thanks to modern technology, we have lost a good deal of the tradition of thank you notes.  I had decided that I wanted to recognize all the kind strangers-become-friends whom we met on our journey but I was just going to write ABOUT them.  Rachel’s letter gave me the idea of writing to them…only publicly on the blog in the form of a traditional letter.  I’m thinking it will be a way to be more descriptive of what they did for and with us as well as more personal.  So, here goes the first one to our first angel who volunteered to become part of our journey without even meeting us.

July 2, 2013

Dear Sheila,

Thank you so much for helping out with our putting in and taking out of the river.  When I called the Chesapeake Community Center, it was really a last ditch effort to find someone who would meet us in Athalia, OH, and take Karen’s van for the week and then come downriver some 130 miles the following week to meet us again.  I have spoken to many people about my hunt for a kind person who would want to be part of our journey.  More than once I got that strange look and sometimes the comment:  “I wouldn’t take a whole Saturday to do that for someone I didn’t know!”   I believe you are exceptional in  your readiness to help strangers.

You listened to me that day just five days before we were to leave and you quickly said: “I’ll do it!”  I worried that you maybe did not realize that you were committing to most of the day that it would take to drive down river and then back with us.  But when I emphasized the length of time, you simply wrote back with these words:  “That’s great.  Can’t wait to meet you ladies.”

And now we are friends.  We may or may not see each other again but we are connected by this journey and, of course, through Facebook and email.  You were the one who all along the way “liked” my posts and stayed in touch.  You read the blog from cover to cover before ever meeting us…and yet you STILL came to meet us!  We have shared our stories with each other now and thus recognized that we are all on the same adventure called life, though it takes different shapes and forms.

And you know that the favorite part of me being led to you is your last name: Tiller.  Just like a tiller on a boat, you helped guide our journey and keep us on a good path.

Thank you so much for being open to meeting us and helping us with an open heart and the open arms with which you embraced us when you met us at the other end.

With deep appreciation,

Maggie

PS:  There was another stranger who took this photo for us at the RV park where we landed.  I neither got  her name nor photo but it was kind of her to take this wonderful photo of Sheila between Karen and me.

So, I just learned that one word for a bunch of vultures is a committee of vultures.  While they can also be called a wake, venue, kettle or volt, I found the concept of a committee most intriguing.  Maybe it is because of my non-profit work all these years.  I love the idea of a committee of vultures sitting around considering their next dead meal.  You will recall that I wrote about the electric plant that let out so much hot water from their cooling process that the river rose to 109 degrees.  It was creepy paddling through the mist that rose from the hot water evaporating into the cool air.  One moment we were in cool air, the next in a sauna!  On the other side of the river, waiting to see if we would survive the passage across this hell-like water, was a committee of vultures.  They took me off guard as they were very still, some with their wings spread to dry and others just perched on low branches or the river bank.  My mind could not fathom what I was seeing and then some of them moved and Karen pointed out that they were vultures. Thus ensued a fairly long example of how we cogitate on things like the difference between vultures and buzzards.  We looked it up later and found they are essentially one and the same.  Do dead fish actually emerge from that icky water for them to munch on?

Well, as though that scene was a bit too eerie,  we were pleasantly amused to see yet another committee of vultures a few hundred feet down river.  This committee had certainly NOT considered their actions carefully enough.  We startled them mid-session and they lifted off the river’s edge to fly to a branch.  Question:  why do they always go to dead branches?  Well, they may have considered a different strategy in their next committee meeting for when they all lit upon this branch, the branch broke beneath them and they all flew away.  Needless to say, Karen and I laughed a fair amount and wished we had had a video running.  I think it would have gone viral on You Tube had we caught them in their faux pas.

Anyway, I didn’t get their picture but I did get a shot of the first committee meeting.

Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio: Last night we drove to the home of Pam Laing and enjoyed recounting our week to her, watching a storm that came with flood warnings from inside a home and beginning to acclimate to life off the river again. One fun thing we did to shift from canoe life to real life was to go to a mall and let someone scrub the ground-in dirt off our feet and give us a pedicure! (pictured here are our feet. The third mystery foot is Pam’s. She is also the woman in the attached photo.)
Karen has already left for Jamestown and Pam will be taking me shortly to the airport. We have not decided when we will return to the Ohio River as we have learned much more on this trip about the spring floods and the winds. We’ll do some research on whether late spring or early fall might be best. Since we are clearly in the South now, going earlier or later is not so much of an issue as it was in NY and PA in May or November when we had to wear wet suits. However, going in late June also had its positive side: much longer days, especially here in Ohio where it remained light until 9:30ish! So we have much to discuss and plan in order to meet our goal of completing the Ohio River in the next five years. We have about six hundred miles to go. We have already come about 650 since setting off on the tiny shores of the Cassadaga Creek at Red Bird Corners in NY! So while we have set a goal, this voyage has clearly become more about the journey than the destination!
Thank you, Karen, for sharing this unique journey with me.

Yesterday we put in 22 miles, many of the latter miles paddling against head winds. The winds subsided as we approached Ripley, OH, and the boat club there at about 6:20. We had a real (aka not dehydrated) meal at the restaurant there and then walked about the town before retiring for the night determined to get on the river at dawn before the winds kicked up again. We were on the river by 6:20 this morning to the chirping of birds and roosters crowing across the river. The waters were smooth and we glided down the river with ease watching the sun come up. Having postponed breakfast so that we could get going, we decided after paddling about an hour and a half and getting another 4 1/2 miles under our paddles, to stop at a marina dock for breakfast. By then the wind was whipping up quite a bit and when we got back on the river we knew we had a chore in front of us. We went two miles before pulling into another boat club at Oak Creek. Karen found some helpful people, Alan, Bill and Kim. Alan offered his shower as we waited to see if the wind would ease up. We cleaned up, had a tour of the boat club, chatted for a bit more and then headed out again. About a mile and a half later, the waves peaked at three feet and we were exhausted even though it was a bit of fun on the waves. It had taken us an hour to go that mile and a half without ceasing our paddling. We were spent and thought it might now be dangerous so we hooked up to a private dock and met owners Tom and Sherri Carnahan who let us lunch on their deck overlooking the wavy river. Far better than being in the river! Tom said that the river was not likely going to get calmer for the next couple of days and suggested we head by ferry across the river to Augusta, KY. Long story short (I’ll write more when I have a regular keyboard)…we are happily settled into a very old Kentucky log cabin at a B and B for the night. Our own old Kentucky home. Attached are photos of the log home and the raging waters! We will not make our intended destination of New Richmond but we will have gone 130 miles on our journey and we are proud and content and exhausted!

It is so beautiful in the evening but the day held some interesting challenges from strong headwinds to huge power plants spewing 109 degree water into the river according to a local! We had seen the steam coming off the river ahead of us and when we got there we dipped our hands in and were shocked that it was as warm as a hot tub!
I don’t know if you will able to see the steam in the photo but I have included one of the creek the water empties into.

Oh dear, we happened upon a winery ( http://m.moyerwinery.vpweb.com) that opened just for us to have tea and coffee and buy a couple of bottles!