Before you drop anchor and dive into this entry, I've once again buried two words from my daily calendar somewhere in the story below. They are Careen and Cynosure. Think of it as a treasure hunt on the high seas of prose.

Zimmerman Marine hides behind a curtain of trees, a boatyard tucked away from the river that passes it, as if embarrassed by the sight of so many hulls stripped of their dignity. Sawasdeekat sat in the middle section, freshly washed, sun-dappled, and utterly out of her element. She looked magnificent. She also looked like a whale that had taken a wrong turn and beached itself in a car park.

We were out of the water. Finally. The long, grinding saga of the Atlantic coast, the broken inverter, the one-engine limp through Virginia, all of it had led to this quiet patch of gravel and grass. Now we could sort her out for the long stay. Now we could find an RV.

I had done my research. Hours of it. Spreadsheets, forum threads, YouTube reviews watched at two in the morning with the sound low so as not to wake Pookie. I had a shortlist of manufacturers and one firm rule: do not go wild on the length. Many camps across America, apparently, draw the line at thirty-six feet. Anything longer and you are banished to the overflow lot with the horse trailers and the people who bring their own patios.

We had ordered a new power cable, a thick, heavy thing designed to survive the American electrical grid, and before we had even said hello to our neighbours we decided to exploit one of Zimmerman's better ideas. The yard keeps two Jeeps for people like us, fools who choose to live on their boats while stranded on dry land. We needed no second invitation. We asked for the keys before the dust had settled on our arrival.

The Jeep took us to the Hole in the Wall, a waterfront grill just across the bridge and onto Gwynn's Island. The island itself carries history in its soil: Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, made his final stand here in 1776 before fleeing the colony for good. We cared less about the governor and more about the burgers. The staff smiled. The seafood arrived. The view stretched across the Milford Haven estuary, that narrow tidal strait that separates Gwynn's Island from the mainland. We ate and we looked and we realised, with a quiet thrill, that this was America now. This was our life for the foreseeable future.

Pookie's ears pricked up as we walked back to the car. She stopped. She tilted her head. "That's Thai," she said.

I listened. It was Thai. A table of eight, chattering away, their voices carrying across the pontoon with the easy rhythm of people who had no idea anyone nearby could understand them. With a little nudge Pookie approached them, said hello in her mother tongue, and watched their faces transform from surprise to delight. Within moments we were friends, swapping numbers, promising to meet again. They worked in Richmond, seventy miles away, and had come to a nearby beach house for a midweek escape. The encounter felt like a small miracle, a reminder that the world is smaller than it looks and that Pookie can find Bangkok in the unlikeliest of places.

Over the next few days the boatyard slowly revealed its cast of characters. Guy lent us a transformer, a heavy black box that would keep our batteries alive until the Victron people returned with a new inverter. Lee and Stephanie introduced themselves, new sailors in the strange purgatory of boat maintenance. Most people did not live aboard while hauled out. They either lived or rented nearby, or winterised their boats and flew home awaiting a new sailing season. We were the odd ones, the stubborn ones, the ones who wanted to oversee every screw and wire. The yard only offered one male toilet and one female toilet for the entire operation and this could have been a reason most stayed elsewhere. The heat was almost certainly another. The June sun usually turned the boat into a kiln by mid-morning. We sweated, we waited and learned the rhythm of the yard.

Mathews, the nearest town, sits just across the East River, a quiet cluster of shops and churches and a middle school. Virginia, we noticed immediately, has a lot of churches. A lot. The 2020 census counted twenty-six in Mathews County alone, serving a population of just over eight thousand. That is roughly one church for every three hundred people. In the West Midlands, where we live, the ratio is closer to one per seventeen hundred. How these small congregations survive, and who fills the pews on a Sunday morning remains a mystery to me. Most are pretty white churches with traditional steeples, others, like the above, appear to be concerted factory units - Yuech! (yes that REALLY IS A CHURCH)

As new arrivals, apart from many political or nationalistic signs, we noticed almost immediately the obsession with lawns. Virginia treats grass with the reverence other cultures reserve for temples. Detached houses sit on two-acre plots of immaculate turf, cut to the precision of a golf fairway. Even the central reservations on the highways look manicured. The lawns of America cover thirty million acres, a vast green blanket stitched together by sprinklers and fertiliser and a cultural compulsion that dates back more than a century. Nothing is out of place. No rubbish. No weeds. Just an unbroken sea of green, a monument to order and quiet suburban devotion.

Back in the yard Guy's transformer gave us a taste of real power. A cup of coffee became a ritual of luxury. Then the new cable arrived, thick and sturdy, and the replacement Victron inverter landed in Portsmouth. The technicians came, lifted the heavy 8000a unit into the boat, ran their tests, and vanished. The moment the system came online, the batteries drank deep and the cabin hummed with electricity.

Cool air followed. Sawasdeekat's built-in air conditioning requires the boat to be in the water, a fact that becomes inconvenient when you are parked on gravel. So we drove to Home Depot in Gloucester and bought a window unit, the kind you see in every American film, bolted into the window of a Brooklyn apartment or a motel in the desert. We ran a separate cable for the 120-volt supply, and suddenly the cabin was cold. Gloriously, blissfully cold. We were cool, well fed, and happy.

Pookie was ecstatic. She had been banned from the microwave, the air fryer, the cooker, every appliance that made her the culinary force she is. Now she had power. She went shopping. She bought lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, fish sauce, the whole arsenal. The boat filled with steam and fragrance and the clatter of woks. For the first time in months, Sawasdeekat became a proper kitchen. She was the cynosure of the boatyard, the strange catamaran that smelled of Thai food and hummed with electricity while every other boat sat silent and shuttered.

Once we were truly settled, we turned our attention to the future. The list of repairs sat on the table like a fantasy novel. Fix the port engine leak. Service both engines. Resurrect the Fischer Panda (POS) generator. Remove the old solar panels and install a new array capable of three kilowatts. Investigate a second engine-mounted generator. Buy a new Code Zero sail. Eighteen months, we thought. Plenty of time.

Reality arrived with a quote.

Zimmerman's estimator, a man who exuded the quiet confidence of someone who had never been contradicted, informed us that a major service on both engines would cost $12,500. I blinked. I showed him the numbers. A reconditioned Yanmar 75HP turbo marine engine with a one-year warranty could be bought for $5,500. The service on our existing engines would cost more than replacing them. He did not flinch. He did not negotiate. He simply repeated the figure with the serene certainty of a man who knew we had nowhere else to go. It was a masterclass in ultracrepidarian confidence, a performance so polished that I almost applauded before I remembered he was trying to bankrupt us.

One by one, the dreams died. The solar array, the Code Zero, the generator, all of it evaporated in the face of American boatyard economics. Our meagre pounds would not stretch. The grand plan of improving Sawasdeekat collapsed, and we turned our attention back to the RV.

Then came the epiphany.

Why buy a great big motorhome and tow a car behind it like a metal caravan? Why not buy a pickup truck and fit a fifth-wheel trailer to the bed? The new dream took root, grew leaves, and before I knew it we had hired a car and were driving off to look at pickup trucks.

Join us next week as we go truck hunting, discover that American car dealerships are a sport unto themselves, and find out whether our new plan survives contact with reality.