M/V Nearly Perfect: September 7-9, 2015

We said goodbye to Martha, George, and Donadee at 7:00 and at 7:45 we officially left Lake Michigan and entered the river system. We will travel the Chicago Sanitary Canal which will feed into the Illinois River. We went through numerous bridge openings and two locks which were a piece of cake. The locks we will go through on the river system are quite large to accommodate all the barge traffic along the rivers. We had to wait about 20 minutes at one lock, but the bridges and the other lock went very smoothly. We also entered a more industrial area with quite a bit of barge traffic. We docked on a city wall at Joliet at 2:15 and just relaxed the rest of the day. We left Joliet at 6:50 am Tuesday morning to get an early start in the locks. However, our plan backfired and we had about an hour wait at the first lock – just enough time for everyone we left back in Joliet to catch up with us. We eventually left the Chicago industrial area and entered the farmlands of Illinois for a nice change of scenery. We had a long wait at the second lock too, plus a pretty good rainstorm after we left the lock. There was no wait at the third lock. We docked at Heritage Harbor Marina in Ottawa around 4:00. It was a very long day of hurrying up and waiting. Heritage Harbor was a very nice marina with great facilities, including a swimming pool. The people went out of their way to make sure we had everything we needed, including getting a service man to our boat and to Spirit. We stayed an extra day in Ottawa to get some work done on the boat, do some cleaning and run errands. The marina has a courtesy car and we used it to make a grocery store, laundry, and Walmart run. Six of us (Dan and Sue (Tranquility) and Jack and Jane (Spirit)) drove to Peru, Illinois to eat Mexican food at Jalapenos (it was recommended by one of the staff at the marina). It was pretty good (but still not Texas). An interesting historical fact about Ottawa is that it was the site of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate on August 21, 1858. Another fact - September 9th was our 8 month anniversary of being on the loop. Where has the time gone??