I think it’s safe to say that our membership to the America’s Great Loop Cruiser’s Association (AGLCA) has made our trip possible. Our first experience with their events was at a Looper Lifestyle event in Annapolis. Then we watched a presentation at the Chicago Boat Show. We did an online Spring Rendezvous during Covid, a Fall Rendezvous in Rogersville, AL, at the beginning of our Loop, and now, the Spring Rendezvous in Norfolk, VA.

Many people come to this event on their boats, and we took our boat to the Fall Rendezvous last October. But we knew from experience that we don’t like having a date and place to take our boat and then have to rush to be there. This was a good decision this time, because our boat only made it as far as Southport, and it would have been such a stretch to make it all the way to Norfolk. So, I flew from home to be there. Owen had a work thing in a different city and joined me later.

The Rendezvous has two tracks: one for planners and one for people in progress. We had done the planners part already, and the in progress part included route sessions for the Loop from Norfolk to the site of the next Rendezvous in Tennessee in the fall.

The event went from Monday through Thursday with sessions in the morning and into the early afternoon, followed by “Looper Crawls” in the afternoon. During the crawl, attendees open up their boats for visitors to help them see the pros and cons of different boats for the Loop. There are big and small boats and fancy and simple boats on the crawls, and you would not believe how helpful it is to see these different styles and help Loopers find their perfect Loop boat.

There are also social events, lunches, dinners, and presentations by sponsors. It’s a jam-packed week with a lot of choices to give people a lot of information about the Loop. We would have missed so much stuff on our Loop if we hadn’t attended each of these Rendezvous (okay, I had to look up the plural of “rendezvous.” It’s “rendezvous” or “rendezvouses,” which I thought was funnier, but not standard).

Essentially, it’s a week of people either living the dream or planning to live the dream, and the people teaching the sessions who have already lived the dream. The dream is being lived, which makes for a week filled with lots of people interested in the very same thing.