Back from our visit to the US, and what a long, strange trip it's been. High points included seeing most of both our families, visiting old friends in Boulder (and dropping in on our old workplaces), seeing Alex and Penelope who we cruised with last year on the ICW and in the Bahamas (Odyssey), meeting some wonderful people who we had known only as email correspondents, and hiking in Colorado, Sedona, and Yosemite. Low points were dental work, the stock market, the discovery that I'd been the victim of identity theft sometime this past year (probably in Miami), and watching New York's financial district and a chunk of the Pentagon go down in flames.
We were supposed to fly back on September 11th; instead we spent most of the day in an airport coffee shop watching CNN. It was several days before we could even get through to the airlines to reschedule our flights, but we didn't do anything interesting or useful, just watched the news and talked with our friends in hushed but angry voices. I think we watched more hours of television that week than we had in the previous five years! When we finally got on our plane to Houston, a week after we were originally set to fly, it was two-thirds empty, as were the planes on the other two legs (Houston to San Juan, San Juan to Grenada). What a contrast to the trip north, when all five planes (we had to fly Grenada - Barbados - St. Lucia - San Juan) were nearly full. It's not just the US economy that's going to be hurting from this.
Our personal economy is certainly hurting. We have enough money that's not in the stock market that we aren't in any immediate difficulty, but returning to work has changed from a question of if to when. Our goals are to find interesting jobs, in a place we'd like to live, which pay well; we hope that it will be possible to find at least two out of three!
The return to the boat was a bit of a nightmare. We had shut down all the systems, put freshwater in the toilet lines, pickled the watermaker and so on. But the toilets still stank when we opened them up, and when we fired up the watermaker it leaked a regular torrent of saltwater all over the settee locker. Worse yet, the refrigerator wouldn't start. In the brutal heat and humidity, with no cold drinks to hydrate us, no food other than granola bars and canned fruit, and no fresh water to shower off in (we had deliberately left the tanks near empty), our heads spun every time we started working. Britt flopped on the bed and moaned that he had reverse altitude sickness. I was just depressed. After weeks in the crisp Colorado sunshine, seeing our friends and staying in nice houses, the boat seemed unbearably hot, stinky, small, rolly, and lonely. For the first time I wondered if leaving our cushy life in Boulder to become sea gypsies had been a big mistake.
But things are gradually looking up. The next morning we mustered enough energy to put up the big awning, which kept the cabin temperature down to a more tractable 86°, and we bought cold drinks, ice, and sandwich makings at the marina store. The fridge problem turned out to be that old devil corrosion, sworn enemy of all cruisers; an electrical connector and a length of cable had become masses of grey ick. Britt made a jury-rig fix using an old (dated 1972!) AC junction box that another boater gave us, and a piece of spare cable, but the parts don't fit back into the fridge electrics box, so we'll ultimately have to do something else. The watermaker leak yielded to a big wrench and a tube of leak-lock. The old, stinky seawater that had been in the head intakes has been flushed out of the system, and although our toilets certainly don't smell like roses, they no longer smell like long-dead sea creatures.
There is still a lot to do before we can move on. Windom's wearing quite a hula skirt of marine grass; if we don't get scraping, we're not going anywhere. We bought a depthsounder head in the US to replace the one we fried in our electrical failure in July, and we need to install it. It was much cheaper to get it in the US, but we gave up some of our savings when we were too honest at Grenadan customs and admitted we'd brought back some gear for our boat. Most countries allow duty-free importation of parts for boats in transit, but not Grenada. When we found out we'd have to pay 37% duty, our honesty shrank significantly, along with the declared price of the depthsounder.
It's still way too hot here. Tropical lassitude creeps into our bones, sapping our strength and will. But at least we've got cold drinks now.