Tug Calypso's Great Loop Adventure: Canada, at last!

We are finally in Canada - arrived yesterday and cleared customs at Kingston. It was a very painless process. Kingston is a beautiful city and the marina is in the heart of downtown - just steps away from lots of pubs, shopping, historic buildings, pubs, churches, pubs, and more pubs. Mark thinks Kingston is heaven - maybe has something to do with all the pubs! We took the trolley tour this morning and saw the Royal Military College which is the Canadian equivalent of West Point. The campus was beautiful.

To backtrack just a bit, we left Oswego, NY on Friday and motored to Sacket's Harbor, NY. It was not a perfect weather day and we had a rather rolly ride for much of the trip. Sacket's Harbor, though, was a beautiful port of call. We found it to be a quaint little village with a number of good restaurants, some antique shops, and lots of beautiful flowers. Sacket's Harbor was the US naval headquarters on the Great Lakes/St Lawrence River during the War of 1812, so there are a lot of activities going on there this summer. We toured the Sacket's Harbor Battlefield Historic site, which included the Navy commandant's home from circa 1860. It turned out that the last Navy commandant to live there was Tatnall from Georgia, who resigned his US Navy commission to return to Georgia and serve in the Confederacy. "Failure to launch" must have been a problem back then also, as our tour guide informed us that the Tatnalls' five grown children lived with them.

We had planned to leave Sacket's Harbor Saturday morning, but we ran into our first problem on this trip. When I got up, I noticed that my hand was a little sore. I looked down and discovered it was swollen slightly. I showed it to Mark and while he was looking at it, my hand almost doubled in size. I wasn't aware of banging it on anything, twisting it, etc., but it just ballooned in an instant. Needless to say, we were both scared to death - in a strange place, didn't know a soul, and didn't know what to do. I asked a lady I saw getting off another boat if she knew where an urgent care facility was and she acted like I had leprosy. We finally determined that there was a hospital about 10 miles away and Mark arranged for a taxi to come and pick us up. While waiting for the taxi, a gentleman out walking his dog did offer to drive us to the hospital if the taxi didn't show up. At Good Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, they took x-rays, drew blood, and did an ultrasound to check for blood clots in my arm, but nothing showed up. Basically they didn't have a clue what had caused the swelling, but didn't think it was anything serious. And restoring our faith in humankind, the gentleman who had offered to drive us stopped by the ER to see if we needed anything.

Sunday morning the swelling had gone down considerably and there was no pain as long as I didn't try to use my hand (the right one, of course), so we decided to move on to Kingston. Well, this afternoon we decided that it wouldn't hurt to have it checked again since now that the swelling has gone down there is a knot, so we walked to the local hospital. Found the urgent care clinic to be packed with people who had been waiting over two hours just to sign in (a preview of Obama-care?), so decided that I was probably going to live and could wait and see what happens between here and our next port of call. If the weather is good tomorrow, we will start working our way west toward Trenton and the beginning of the Trent-Severn Canal.