The Fort Myers Yacht Basin. As you can see we're way out on the end. That
bridge is the first of three 55' bridges we'll have to tilt under on our way
out.

We took the lines down and took them to a laundromat (I'm sure everyone else
was wondering what these strange people were doing, washing miles of
rope...) and then reinstalled them. One got hung up, so to help it through
Britt went up the mast. Along with his tools, he took the camera! You can
see our brand new sky-blue bimini and dodger that was just installed
yesterday, as well as the solar panels with the windgenerator on the left
and the radar on the right.

Here we are going full tilt, so to speak. I am not looking forward to doing
this again to make the last three bridges downriver of the marina...

I just took the photos off the camera and realized I hadn't been posting
pictures recently. Here's me at the wheel, motoring away from the boatyard
early on a misty morning. No bimini and dodger (the canvas that normally
stretches among the bare metal bars you see), no wind generator, just one
solar panel (the broken one). But at least we're floating!

still in: Fort Myers, FL

We've been working on bringing Windom back into cruising shape. Most of our systems have been tested now, and we've at least bought parts to fix the ones that succumbed to corrosion or other ills. Of course there were several things that stopped working while we were cruising, and we put off fixing them "until we come back" - well, we're back now, and can't put it off any longer! So this morning Britt replaced the bilge pump float switch, which had stopped working while Windom was on the hard, and I crawled into the engine compartment and replaced the switch that allows us to combine our "engine" and "house" battery banks, which had broken a long time ago but which we'd never got around to fixing. (Lest you think that I'm some sort of mechanical whiz, I should point out that I usually just fetch and carry tools while Britt fixes things, but I do have enough know-how to wire things up to the specs of a diagram.)

We haven't yet put the sails back on, but we bought enough string to allow us to pull the lines completely out of the mast so we can take them off and wash them. Then we'll reattach them to the strings and pull them back into place. We haven't even looked at the dinghy outboard motor, which will probably need some work to get going. We aren't starting the watermaker up yet, because once we do we will have to run it periodically, to keep it from growing ick. But just about everything else is either working - or we're working on it!

In my opinion the most important system aboard is the refrigerator, and fortunately that's working fine. Once we got the RV we loaded up at the grocery store with enough supplies to get us going again. (Then yesterday I went to the local farmer's market, which is fantastic - bell peppers and cucumbers and grapefruit and strawberries, oh, my!) It's got me thinking about provisioning for our cruise, so I have been reviewing my old notes about what to take, along with the spreadsheet I made that uses assumptions based on how much we use of everything from rolled oats to candy bars, and calculates what we need. I remember making huge provisioning runs, loading up with a huge pile of groceries that looked as though they'd never all fit in our little boat. But some things go behind one cushion, some behind another, some under a seat and some under our bed, and pretty soon all the groceries are stowed.

Of course that's something else we have a spreadsheet for - where it all goes. Everything, not just groceries, gets inventoried:  spare oil filters, bleach, paper towels, beer. If we don't keep track of where things go, chances are we'll never find them again! Ok, that's a bit dramatic, but it's no fun to dismantle half the boat looking for something, since most storage areas aren't like cabinets in houses, where you simply open a door or drawer. No, to get something on a boat usually means removing cushions and lifting out panels, and of course all of the stuff that gets moved has to be set somewhere, which blocks access to whatever storage is there until you're done here, and so on and so forth.

Since we've been away for a few years we've forgotten where some things go, but our spreadsheets remind us that cookies get piled behind the center cushion of the starboard settee. We've changed a few storage locations, but for the most part we're sticking with what we had before. In between projects we've been busily finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place. Our aft head (bathroom) is still piled with gas jugs and spare lines, and the garage (that's the aft cabin, and if you're coming to visit we promise to have it cleared out by the time you get here) is a bit helter-skelter, but the rest of our house is fairly well in order now.

During the past few days it's been rainy (no doubt triggered by the arrival of our new solar panel! It's still in the garage, waiting better weather for installation) so these indoor projects are all we've been doing lately. Except maybe I'm getting a little bit of cabin fever, because I wrote a song.

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas
I've got umbrellas on my list.
Where the palm trees glisten
And children listen
To hear foghorns in the mist (blaaaattt...)

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas
Though it may seem an odd refrain,
Though there's snow from Michigan to Maine -
Here in Florida we're not shoveling rain!

Have a happy merry, whatever you celebrate. (We're celebrating the accomplishment of boat tasks and the prospect that we'll be cruising soon.)

currently in:  Fort Myers, FL

Somebody once said (and I'd Google who it was if I had a better net connection!) that there are no strangers - just friends he hadn't met yet. That's an apt description of life on a cruising boat, too; one of the things we love about the lifestyle is that we are part of this amorphous social blob of "boat people", who are by and large pretty wonderful people who are always willing to help others out.

Down the dock from us are Jar and Bruce on Pegasus II, a big Gulfstar motorsailer. When I mentioned to Jar that we needed to rent a car to retrieve our RV from Glades Boat Storage, she offered to drive us out instead, which was awfully nice considering that it's about an hour each way. So we all took a Sunday drive out to the boat yard, and now we have our RV. It's useful for shopping and other errands (we are, of course, spending like sailors), but hopefully we'll have it sold before we leave here. (Anyone want to buy an RV?)

Then the other day, we had a pleasant visit from Marilyn and Jim Anderson who also have a Caliber 40 (but older than ours and not the LRC model with super-humongo-tankage), Summer Wind. Their boat's at a dock in Key Largo; they drove over three hours to come visit us! I'd actually been corresponding with Marilyn quite a bit over the past several years as they read our weblog - and let me just say that we always love meeting people who know us through the website, so if you are at all on our route or even plan to be on vacation in the area, don't be shy, drop us a line. (Our email address is in the sidebar menu; you can also comment to this blog, and it will be emailed to us. Comments on the lj feed don't get emailed to us, but while we have net access I am checking it every once in a while. I won't be able to do that, though, when we're in the Bahamas.) The Andersons brought us lovely Christmas prezzies (and may I say that Illinois wine is surprisingly tasty?  Yep, we've already tapped the bottle!), politely averted their eyes from the mess that is a cruising boat in full recommissioning mode, and took us out to lunch. Jim promised to send us some old charts and other info about the Keys. Since the Keys are their stomping ground they were full of suggestions and advice, and hopefully when we are down in that area we'll get them to lead us around and show us all the good stuff. And maybe we'll lure them to the Bahamas with us. It's always fun traveling with others, and it would be cool to travel with a "sistership" - make people think they're seeing double!

The people who work at the marina here have been helpful and friendly, as have the folks at the office which handles city parking permits. But for service above and beyond, I have to say that a fellow named John Drake really deserves accolades. He runs a business called Solar Seller (website www.solarseller.com) and he was one of the people I called trying to locate a replacement for the solar panel that was shattered when our wind generator fell off in Blanquilla. I'd been making phone calls all afternoon; when our original vendor told us that this model had been discontinued, I called the company (Siemens Solar, which is now Shell Solar) and was given a list of distributors, all of whom came up blank but suggested particular dealers to call. Alas, nobody had any left, and all the currently manufactured solar panels are squarish rather than long and skinny - it would be best for us, of course, to be able to pop an identical panel into the existing bracket, but we could probably deal with a similarly shaped one. One distributor gave me John's number, saying, "He stocks all sorts of weird stuff." I left a message and about an hour later, John called me back saying that although he no longer sold solar panels, he'd located someone selling exactly the model we're after - never used - on Ebay! He gave me the item number; I checked it out, bought one (for about 2/3 what we paid originally), and it's supposed to arrive tomorrow. Yay! I never would have thought to look on Ebay, and with our slow connection it would have been difficult to find through searching (plus it was listed under the original manufacturer, Arco, rather than Siemens). So because John was so helpful in a situation where he wasn't even making any money from the deal, I'm giving him a plug here.

Anyway, we're slowly settling into the "community" of the Fort Myers Yacht Basin, and know several people (and two dogs and a cat) by name. We also got our single-sideband radio (SSB) going again, and amazingly enough managed to check in to the Cruiseheimer's Net - we'd noticed our copper foil running to the arch, which we use as counterpoise, had corroded through, but we still had a strong enough signal to be heard by net control, who that day was in the Bahamas (and who, much to our gratification and surprise, had been reading a saved copy of our old weblogs just the previous night). The radio nets have been a mainstay of our cruising life, and although most of the boat names we heard were unfamiliar, we recognized several from our previous voyages. We chatted briefly with Neal on Rhapsody, whom we spent quite a bit of time with on the east coast and in the Bahamas our second year; hopefully we'll catch up with each other in person in the Bahamas in a month or so. And even though most of this season's crop of cruisers are just boat names on the radio to us now, eventually we'll catch up to them as well - after all, they're just friends we haven't met yet.

currently in: Fort Myers, FL

Yay, we're on the water again! We got splashed Tuesday afternoon and spent the evening ferrying things from the RV to the boat. Wednesday morning we rolled out of bed, put on many layers of clothes (a cold front's come through and it's icy-cold, at least by Florida standards - below 40 degrees overnight, although the sun's out and warming things up), fired up the engine, dropped the dock lines, and motored off down the river. We swapped turns behind the wheel, each of us driving until we got chilled and then going below where it was nice and toasty, due to our heater system distributing engine heat around the cabin.

Our first test as sailors (well, as boaters; we, um, haven't actually attached the sails yet!) we failed miserably, as at the Ortona Lock just a few miles down the canal I wasn't in a good position to tie to the wall, and then missed the stern line thrown to me by the canal worker, and Windom's stern swung away. I then backed up with too much throttle and nearly hit the other side of the lock! Argh. Finally we got lined up, with much work. It was a small consolation to see the tugboat behind us also have problems with his stern swinging away from the tie-up wall. But it reminded me that we will need to relearn all the little techniques of boat handling.

At Franklin Lock we tied to the south wall, which made things much easier as I just slid alongside and allowed the north wind to blow us into position. It then blew Britt's hat off, so after we were dropped a few feet and cleared to leave the lock, we pushed off from the lock wall and smartly executed a Hat Overboard maneuver. I drove slowly up to the bobbing white object, with Britt giving me directions once I could no longer see it - then he scooped it out with our long-handled net. (Hey, this was useful practice!)

By the time we passed through the final drawbridge we were feeling as though we'd eased back into the boating routine. But we knew we had two more big tasks ahead of us. The first was to pass under several 55-foot fixed bridges between us and the Fort Myers Marina. This task sounds a lot less trivial when you realize that our mast height is 56 and a half feet! That doesn't even count the junk at the top, a VHF antenna and a wind indicator and a lightning brush, so we're probably more like 57 feet.

We'd done this going the other way, so we knew the drill. Just before the first of the bridges, we anchored. First we moved all our movable gear over to the port side (that's the left, facing forward, for all you landlubbers) which gave us a tilt of about 4 degrees. Then we filled our empty gasoline jugs with river water and hung them from the end of our boom, which we supported using two halyards from the top of the mast. Our two dead engine batteries, about 60 pounds each, joined them. We tied a few buckets of water among them, and then swung the boom out far to the side. This gave us a total of about 10 degrees, so Britt slid the dinghy out and tied that to the end of the boom as well, filled with river water. Unfortunately the boom was so low at that point that the dink still rested on the water, but some of its weight acted on the boom and pulled us a little further over.

We didn't get quite the lean that we had on the way up, but we had two advantages this go-round; the low tide was lower than it had been when we'd done it before, and the north wind acted to "blow the water out" of the river, making for an exceptionally low tide. The clearance board read 56' and we easily cleared our bridges; we motored between mud flats down the channel and anchored just outside the Fort Myers Yacht Basin to undo our tilting gear.

When we were mostly put to rights, I called the Yacht Basin on VHF to tell them we were coming in. We have reservations for a month; we figure we've got two or three weeks of work to do on Windom to get shipshape again, and the monthly rate is a better deal than the daily rate for anything over about a week. It's a nifty location, right downtown, although we'll need to do the tilty thing again to get out as there are three more 55' bridges to go.

Docking at a marina makes me a little nervous at the best of times, since we don't really do it enough to get in practice - and of course we've been out of practice for over two years! With a north wind blowing better than 20 knots I was really not looking forward to the fine maneuvering that would keep us from hitting the concrete pier. But I eased in slowly, staying to the upwind side, nosed in by the stern piling as Britt slipped a dockline over it, and then...stopped.

We'd run aground halfway into the slip!

The marina worker who was there to take our bow lines assured us it was just soft silt down there, and that I should power forward - and let me tell you, it's an eerie feeling giving a boat full throttle ten feet from a concrete pier. But we squooshed through the bottom (so much for our new coat of bottom paint!) and slid gently into our new temporary home. The grounding was, of course, due to the unusually low tide.

So here we are. Lots of work to do! But gosh, it's nice to be floating again. Boats belong in the water, and this one is happy to be wet again.

alas, still in:  Glades Boat Storage yard, Moore Haven, FL

What a surprise! Under the dirt and mildew of the past two years, it's still our old familiar Windom. And as our boat gradually emerged, so did our memories.

This boat was our home for three and a half years - and when you live in a place for a while, you get used to it. You put certain things in certain places. You remember to duck your head when you go through the doorway that's just an inch too short. You know where to reach for the light switch even if you can't see it in the dark. It's home, right?

So we found ourselves saying things to each other such as, "Can you put this in the junk drawer?" and, "I think it's in the coffin." (The "junk drawer" is not a drawer at all, but an odd-shaped space behind the forwardmost cushion of the starboard-side settee, and the "coffin" is the storage area under our bed, large enough for us to easily stash a body or two.) We only knocked our heads a few times getting in and out of the nav station, and our bodies knew where to find latches and switches even when our brains hadn't thought about them for ages. We found the clothes we'd left aboard, and the books. Little things would trigger memories of times we hadn't thought about in ages; I was cleaning the companionway steps, for example, and suddenly I remembered the windy day at Buena Vista Cay in the Jumentos islands of the Bahamas when I stripped and refinished them while Britt was off fishing.

Our boat's not the only thing bringing back memories. Tom and Cindy, who we met in the Caribbean, are preparing their boat Feather to go back in the water, too. We all went out to dinner in LaBelle, and reminisced about going out in St. Martin.

It's all familiar, and yet at the same time unfamilar. Yes, this was our home - but we've been living in a different home now for several years, and our old patterns are tempered with the new ones we've developed. It's still the same boat, but two years of hard living have made some changes. I guess that somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that we'd just step instantly into the old world we had, as though we'd never been away, but realistically I know that's not possible. As the saying goes, you can't step in the same river twice. Heck, you can't step in the same river once. Things change, people change, the world changes. The river goes by, fast, and it doesn't stop.

But change is okay. After all, if we didn't feel we could cope with the unfamiliar, we would never have gone cruising in the first place. We may have to practice a bit, at first, but we'll figure out our boat again. Many of our friends have quit cruising, or have gone on to other oceans, but we'll meet new ones. I'm sure the Bahamas is no longer what we remember (if it ever was!) but I'm also sure it will still be great to get there. So it may not be the same river, but we're anxious to get wet again!

Here Britt is applying a thick goop of epoxy to the worst spot on the keel
from the reef attack. He shaped it with a plastic knife; after it dried, we
sanded it, and after a coat of bottom paint it looks as good as new.

One of our out-of-the-water tasks is to fix the damage where we hit a reef
in Utila, Honduras.

[This is the third try at sending this - it actually comes before the three photos and the "grime and slime" post. Blogger's failing to post, grr. That's why things seem a bit out of order!]

currently in:  Glades Boat Storage yard, Moore Haven, FL

The last week passed in a bit of a blur. Britt had become quite sick to his stomach - we thought from something he ate - and after a day of rest, we did a cursory stab at sightseeing New Orleans and then drove on to Mobile, where we stayed with friends. As it turned out whatever Britt had was contagious and I came down with it a few days later just as he started feeling better - I hope our friends didn't get it! I'm still feeling rather yucky.

I was hoping that finally coming into the boatyard again, after so long, and seeing Windom again would lift my spirits. Instead, the first thing we heard when we entered the yard was, "By the way, we've had a few break-ins lately, and your boat was broken into last night."

We climbed the ladder with trepidation. The companionway hatch was still locked - the only way to break in there would have been to totally bust the wooden frame - but the big central hatch (like a window, only horizontal) lay wide open, and it was clear its latches had been twisted off and broken. We'd heard that the burglars were thought to be local "kids" who ignored expensive boat electronics and went instead for stereos and booze. And indeed, although the radar, gps, and vhf and ssb radios were still in their places, the car stereo was ripped out of the wall where we'd installed it, the CD changer was gone, and one of our interior speakers was heavily damaged (probably someone tried to remove it and couldn't). Unfortunately, the burglars didn't find the 3/4 full bottle of rotgut vodka we keep for killing fish - a few good slugs of that and they'd have had their come-uppance, you can bet!

The police are coming tomorrow to take a report we can use for filing with our insurance, but I'm not sure it's really going to be worth it - the total cost of what was taken or wrecked was probably about $750, but I doubt they'd pay full replacement value on 4-year-old electronics, so it might not even top the $250 deductible. And I suspect the damage to the hatch falls under hull deductible, which is a lot more. We'll see. Grr.

Other than that, the boat is a complete and utter mess. Part of that is because we left all the storage compartments open and the cushions awry, hoping the air circulation would prevent mildew. But part of that is due to an infestation of hornets, who built a nest under the dinghy and found their way into the boat, where they were killed by the various formaldehyde and other chemical packets we had around the boat as preservatives. So there are dead hornets everywhere, and dead other icky bugs as well. We had an aluminum pan of charcoal in the center of the floor (another sort of preservative), which is where the burglars jumped down onto when they came in through the sunroof, so there are bits of charcoal everywhere. And more ominously, there are little piles of sawdust in various places, suggesting we might have an infestation of boring insects - at leats the hull's fiberglass!

The exterior isn't much better. Windom looks abandoned, poor thing. The deck's horribly dirty, and dirt has streaked the hull where rainwater's run off. The lines are all stiff, and the bird's nest in that one coil has disintegrated to a mess of grass and sticks and dirt. Under the peeling tape, the teak looks like a lost cause, but I imagine some nasty chemicals ought to bring it back from grey to golden again; this year, Britt wants to try oiling the exterior teak rather than painting it with Cetol (which is ugly) or polyurethane (which doesn't last).

It all sounds depressing, and I admit I was a little depressed at first. But as we started making our list of what we need to do to get Windom cleaned up and ready to go in the water, we both found ourselves getting excited. It's not exactly going to be fun, but our progress will be obvious, and it will be wonderful to have a clean and trim boat again.

currently in:  Glades Boat Storage yard, Moore Haven, FL

What. A. Day.

When we'd left the boat two years ago, we made a spreadsheet of all the things we (thought) we needed to do to get underway again, sorted by priority: 1 meant "must do before we get in the water", 2 meant "must do before going anywhere", 3 meant "must do soon", etc. When we saw Windom again we realized we needed to add a list of priority 0: "must do before we can even get started".

While we were doing the first item - removing the formaldehyde packets and airing out the interior - the police came, and we filled out a report and showed them the damage. Of the 14 boats broken into, we're the only owners here, so the police really wanted a statement. Not that we expect anything to be recovered. And since the stereo equipment was attached to the boat, as opposed to just sitting in it, the insurance company classifies it as boat gear rather than personal property, and the hull deductible applies, which means that it's pointless to make a claim.

Then we removed our rather sad and soggy dinghy from its home on the foredeck. We had turned it upside down and strapped it down, maybe thinking that it would protect a bit of the deck and be protected by its hard bottom. Well, that was a mistake. The layers of the material on the sides of the tubes were delaminating and cracked from the sun. I'm not sure what we should have done, though - with its rigid bottom, the dink's too big to stash below. I guess we should have made a cloth cover for it. Heck, it's clear now we should have tried to cover the whole boat!

Our next task was to strip the remaining tape from the teak. We'd applied so-called "7-year tape" over our teak to protect it from the sun. Half the tape had dried up, peeled off, and blown away - and the other half had chemically bonded to the finish on the teak. It took Britt and me more than an hour, I'd guess, to scrape the teak clean with chisels. I'm glad we don't have a lot of exterior teak; refinishing will be a pain, but is a lower priority task that can be done elsewhere.

For some stupid reason we'd left many of our lines (that's the nautical word for 'ropes', for you non-boaty people) out on deck, running through various blocks and chocks, and now they're all green and black with slimy mildew. We really have no idea why we left them out, because it was clearly a mistake - and it seems to us that if we'd thought about it, we'd have removed them, or at least gathered them into bags. Maybe we were addled by the July heat and desperate to get out of the yard. We gathered the icky bits of them up and soaked them in buckets with a bit of laundry detergent. We think we'll have to remove them and take them to a laundromat, if we can figure out how.

The rest of the day was spent cleaning the deck. Now, normally cleaning the deck takes about an hour and a little elbow grease. But normally our deck is merely dirty, not thickly caked with green slime and the detritus of mud-dauber hornet nests. We brewed up a nasty mix of oxalic acid, Lemon Joy, and water; Britt scrubbed the open spaces with a big, long-handled brush, and I used a small brush to get the small spots that he couldn't reach. I should point out here that the yard water here has a strong sulfurous stink, so every time we sluiced the deck (and our bodies) to clean off the chemicals, the smell of rotten eggs filled the air. The anchor locker was particularly foul - our formerly white fenders (inflated plastic cylinders we hang between the boat and the pier when we're at a dock) were completely black. More worrisome was the discovery of a great deal of corrosion on the anchor windlass motor, which is important, expensive, and difficult to replace. We also noted corrosion in many other places; we suspect the "fresh" water here is actually somewhat brackish, and that although we cleaned off all the salt from things, enough remained in the water to damage our equipment. But at least our deck is now - well, I wouldn't call it clean, exactly, but it's no longer horribly filthy.

The final thing we did was make the disheartening discovery that our batteries are all completely dead and will need to be replaced. At this point, if anything actually works when we turn it on, we will probably faint from the shock. But right now we're about ready to faint from exhaustion - time to call it a day. We've got a lot to do tomorrow!

Here's a detail of the teak "eyebrow" rail.

Our grimy, slimy cockpit.

There were lots of mud-dauber nests under the dinghy. Ick.

currently in:  St. Bernard State Park, near New Orleans, LA

We've been slowing down the last few days and actually being tourists, since neither of us have been to Louisiana before. Our first day here we stopped at Mansfield State Historic Site, which was a Civil War battlefield. I think that the reason it is considered important around here is that the Confederates held the line here and prevented the Union from continuing on into Texas. So since the South won, more or less (both sides suffered tremendous casualties as was typical of Civil War battles), they made it into a historical park. We spent the night at Bayou Chicot State Park, which has a nice little network of trails, so I got in a morning run before we headed south again. (I also went running at Copper Breaks State Park in Texas. It's great to get in a little exercise considering that we spend most of the day on our butts driving.)

You may notice a large number of state parks on our itinerary. We love 'em. The campgrounds are relatively inexpensive and usually laid out pleasantly, with lots of room; most commercial campgrounds are twice the price or more and pack in the motorhomes like cars in a parking lot, with corresponding ambiance. So what if there's no cable TV hookup?  We don't have a TV, anyway.

Lafayette had no state park, but we pulled up at the ludicrously inappropriately named "Bayou Wilderness RV Park" (which looked like a beautifully landscaped, very large parking lot) and inquired about prices. When the woman at the desk said "$30" our faces fell - then she pulled out a map and showed us where the city campground was. $9 a night (with electricity!), only three other people in the 40-or-so spaces, and there was a really nifty nature center with observation deck (closed while we were there, but it looked like the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse), and a small network of trails. Far more wilderness-y, even though it was tucked away at the end of a subdivision behind some soccer fields.

In Lafayette we visited the Acadian Cultural Center to learn about Cajun history; then that evening we got some hands-on experience when Matt, a "coon-ass" friend of ours (I swear, that's what he calls himself!) who lives here took us to dinner at Prejeans for some Cajun food and music. The gumbo was awesome; we also had fried shrimp, crawfish, frog's legs, and alligator. Kind of hard to distinguish the distinct flavor under all that breading, and we both hit our fried-foods tolerance quickly, but it was tasty!

Matt also advised us to see Nottoway, the largest antebellum plantation house in Louisiana, on our way east. On our way there we crossed the Atchafalaya Swamp, which was rather cool; the highway was two parallel, perfectly straight lines, raised on pilings over green-scummed swampwater and a tangle of cypress. We also stopped in to see the Plaquemine Locks State Historic Site, where a lock with a 50-foot drop once connected the Mississippi River with a bayou waterway system that cut 125 miles off the trip from the Gulf to Baton Rouge. The old lockhouse was quite lovely, testament to a bygone philosophy of building that favored attractiveness over lowest-bidder functionality. Then we proceeded to the mansion to see how the other half (or more accurately, 1%) live. Big and elegant, and the most interesting thing to me was that much of the furniture was original, and the style was wildly ornate. The clawfoot tables even had toenails!

We had been planning to visit New Orleans today, but Britt got sick last night and has been feeling pretty miserable all day. Not sure that we'll take another day tomorrow to be tourists (assuming he's up for it) -Windom's being pulled out of the storage yard on Monday for us, so we'd like to be there by then - we'll see what happens tomorrow.

PS to all our old friends who have been leaving comments and dropping us email - we really appreciate it! Hopefully soon we'll be talking boat talk instead of this boring old RV talk. :-)

currently in: St. Bernard State Park near New Orleans, LA

Sorry about the double post there; we're still getting used to all this new technology. Or to be more precise, we're still playing with our new toys. When we first went cruising in 1999, we had a big, clunky cellphone that could occasionally be coaxed into a 9600 connection but more usually gave us 4800 for a few minutes before mysteriously disconnecting, using an expensive and complicated cable which we'd had to special order, clipped into a dongle hanging off a PCMCIA modem card. Now the modem's built into the teeny phone, which connects via a (cheap) USB cable, and we have 14.4K that seems quite reliable.

I can update the website by email, upload photos by email; we can even look at websites as long as they're not too graphics intensive (or we keep the graphics off). I'm already missing our DSL! And yet, this is all only good until we leave the US coast; then we'll be limited to perhaps 4000 baud SSB or ham radio email.

We each have our own laptop, and we recently upgraded our DeLorme Topo program to version 5, so we're charting our course as we go. (Sort of the land-based equivalent to the computer charting we do at sea, using Nobeltec's Visual Navigation Suite.) Britt has Bluetooth on his computer, which is a sort of wireless connection thingummy, and just bought me a Bluetooth adapter and wireless mouse, so supposedly we can connect our laptops together wirelessly, although so far all we've managed to do has been transfer single files between us. Britt bought an mp3 player called an iRiver, and is figuring out how to use it; the little cellphone is my toy, I guess, and I'm still trying to learn which buttons to push. We've got the new digital camera stashed away somewhere. And each bit of equipment comes with its own cable and power cord and adapter and connector. When we've got everything out, it looks like Mission Control in here.

Yay technology. Lynn and Larry Pardey went to sea with an engineless wooden boat and read by candlelight. Not us, you can bet.

(Speaking of technology, you can now get automagically notified by email every time we update our logs courtesy of Bloglet. Just stick your email address in the little Bloglet box on our sidebar.)