Wasting Away Again

In Margaritaville. The best present day icon in Key West is not Jimmy Buffet, but the guy playing the Margaritaville song until someone in the bar buys him a shot to stop. A few more good songs are played and then to all the boos and groans “that familiar concoction that helps you hang on” is started again as someone goes running up to the bar. It’s really quite ingenious. Of course that is only till 10:00 am, when the band is too drunk to play and the cruise ships release their doors, flooding the small island with thousands of flower shirts, and fanny packs running to get their first margarita.

Our mission was a little different. We spent our first day in Key West, not under the table because of so many drinks, but because we were looking for an elusive outlet to discretely plug in our three different batteries for recharging, without having our server kick us out of the restaurant (Oh, this is great water you are serving here, I think I will splurge and get another.) Of course a battery charge was not all we needed. We still had to find a free internet connection to finish tying up all the loose ends we have created over the last four months.

This was how we came to find our favorite little spot in Key West, a tree. OK, so a little strange, but well worth it when we found the top limbs were quiet, well shaded, and had the best WiFi around. Besides, it was kind of fun to see the look on peoples faces when they happened to glance up and see two people casually sitting 30 feet up working on a computer. And while this might have been our highlight, we did enjoy walking the bar streets, seeing some great street performers, a sailing regatta, and people watching (there are some interesting people to watch here!). If we were here to pound back the drinks this would have been a whole different destination to us, but really we’re just excited to get sailing again, as we are taking off later today. So we’ll be “off the grid” for a bit until we eventually get to Mexico where hopefully it will not be a harrowing tale of gale force winds and crazy waves we have to tell, but one of fair winds and calm seas that saw us to our destinations. Until then, we are signing off; from our last port of call in the US for a long while, bonvoyage.

Ahoy Matey!

So the best way for me to describe the last few weeks here in Florida are to compare them to the movie “Swingers”. Two guys spontaneously decide to “screw it, Lets go to Vegas!” As they get into the car the excitement is infectious as screams of VEGAS BABY! VEGAS!! fill the air as they peal out of LA. Three hours later they are still on their way, tired and hungry and although still excited, their screams have turned into subdued mentioning of “vegas baby, vegas. Interstate 15 is a long and tiring road.

Well after 27 days in Florida, 13 days looking for a
boat to Central America, and 14 days after the initial excitement of finding the boat and waiting for it to arrive, we have finally done it. THE BOAT BABY! THE BOAT!! Yes that is right! All the excitement we initially felt is back as we are now aboard Cinnabar! Lars and Inger, our new Danish sailing family, are wonderful and the boat is beautiful. After waiting out some choppy seas to get to where they were anchored, we climbed aboard what will be our new home for a few weeks. Our introductory night was spent toasting to our new President Obama and to the fair winds we hoped would accompany us south.

And as luck would have it, the weather window we were hoping for came right away. A day after we boarded the winds changed and we got our North Westerlys to head South. Thirty straight hours of good winds, and beautiful turquoise seas later the comforts of our Florida friends were just sweet memories as we pulled into the crowded harbor of Key West (the southern most point of the Continental United States). We’re settling in nicely, our bunks may not be big but they are cozy. The conversation is great and we share all of our meals (with Inger being the expert in galley) Our introduction into meat, after years of veggies came as an open-faced liverwurst, and pastrami sandwich topped with lettuce and onions (a Danish specialty and actually much better than it sounds). All and all we are having a great time and we’re thrilled to be sailing again.

Until getting aboard we have the generosity of one more family to thank- Rouven, Tanya, Koen (3) and Caraina (2), your over generous hospitality, the conversation and the wine were all wonderful! Thanks for a great few days!

CouchSurfing, a revolution in cultural travel

So once again we had another wonderful experience through the generosity of complete strangers. This time it was a fantastic day of sailing with Jerry, a retired electrical engineer living in Fort Lauderdale. How did we meet Jerry? Through CouchSurfing. If you haven’t heard of CouchSurfing already, check it out, it’s pretty incredible. The basics are: you sign up on their website to open up your home (if you have one) to weary travelers- or be available to meet people for a drink or just offer helpful information about things to see around the area. Then as you travel, you get to enjoy the same hospitality being offered by others. There are CouchSurfers all over the world, and we intend to have this amazing network better our travels. You get to meet wonderful people, and who better to show you around a country or city than someone who actually lives there?

So on Friday, along came the Westerly winds and we were able to take advantage of them. A beautiful day out on the Atlantic, cutting through the water on Jerry’s 22’ sailboat. We’ve also met a few other CSers, like MaryBeth, who does a lot of great environmental work and even invited us over for dinner. By the time we take off on our boat hopefully we will have met a few more!

Life Is Good

I’m bouncing off the walls like a pinball, Donny twirls me around, I’m about to burst, I want to go outside and shout at the top of my lungs! He tries to calm me down but I’m not having it- we worked too hard for this. What’s this all about? Well, WE’RE SAILING AWAYYYY (to be sung aloud in your head to the tune of the Styx, not the Eric Cartman version)!! Just about the time our visions of traversing the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean Sea had turned into ridiculously long airport security lines and listening to another perky flight attendant tell us how to stick one end of a seat belt into the other, the phone call came. Lars and Inger, with their beautiful 49 foot cutter Cinnabar, will be our new companions on a voyage down to the Yucatan. We should be getting picked up in West Palm in about 10 days, which gives us some time to catch up on things like this blog, visit friends, and maybe we’ll even get to go to the beach finally!

Lars and Inger are a Danish couple that live in Puerto Aventuras and are taking their boat there. We’ll have a couple week stop in Abuc, a lesser visited Caribbean island. They have dive and snorkel gear aboard so we can enjoy the beautiful Caribbean, plus fishing rods for the freshest seafood you can get. And yes, we already checked on their experience, the life rafts, navigation systems, fire extinguisher to hull ratio, and anti-iceberg torpedoes, so all those friends and family we know already worrying, stop. So yes in fact, life is very, very good.