You Never Know What Will Be Difficult

Friends, I'm irked. This post is the cumulative result of six weeks of steady annoyance. So if you are looking for positivity today, I must sadly suggest you look elsewhere. I am going to be cross and crotchety, and I won't have a good word to say about anyone or anything. Okay? Okay. Let's get started.

Every country has its quirks. As a traveller, most of those quirks fall in the "good" column - different food, pace of life, community rhythms. But some quirks are simply irritating. Remember the mysterious liquor sale laws of New Caledonia?

And somehow, I still always tried to buy cider on a Wednesday afternoon.

In Germany, we had to return our milk bottles to a separate facility than all of our other glass bottles. I couldn't make collect calls from New Zealand. And so the list goes. You never know what a place will do differently than everyone else on the planet.

But I admit, I never expected to find that one can't ship personal goods from Malaysia to Canada.

It's All in the Details

Yesterday, Erik and I spent the day together in the cockpit. The seas were calm, the sky was postcard-blue with little fluffy clouds, and we were glad. My seasickness behind me, we even shared a beer as the sun dipped below the horizon.

Pretty idyllic, right? Well. Let's add in some details.

Yesterday, Day 8 of our slowest passage in six years of sailing, Erik and I spent the day together in the cockpit cleaning a bad load of fuel. Finally the seas were calm, and the 40+ knot squalls that had plagued us for a week had given way to a sky of postcard-blue with little fluffy clouds. We were glad the cargo ships all around seemed to notice us, and no one had tried to run us down for at least 12 hours. Eight hours of diesel work shook my optimism that my seasickness was behind me. But, by the time we finished, nothing could stop us from sharing a beer as the sun dipped below the horizon.

"So, Amy," I hear you ask, gently skirting past my allusions to pathetic 50 NM days and knock-down winds, "how does one clean bad diesel? And how did that happen in the first place?" (Erik just asked me if I mentioned The Engine Impeller That Shredded Itself And Everything Overheated And We Lost 18 Hours, but I think I'm asking enough of you already.)

Trying Not To Get Eaten By Komodo Dragons

My mom is in town, and we're trying to show her a good time. And what better way to entertain a guest than put her in harm's way?

Being in the Komodo islands, it would be silly not to try to see the Komodo dragons. And if you are going to bother travelling to see the dragons, you might as well go in the early morning when they are feeling frisky.

We anchored off Rinca, and headed off bright and early to the ranger's station to pay and collect a guide. The guides are there not only as experts, but for protection. Not only are the dragons huge, their saliva carries all sorts of horrible bacteria and they have venom glands under their teeth to inhibit coagulation. They bite their prey (deer, buffalo - little things like that), hang around for a couple of weeks waiting for it to die a horrible death, then they eat it it. Charming. So I was expecting our walk would be rather like it is on a Kruger National Park walk: a couple of rangers with big guns in front and running sweep, and tourists in the middle.

Hanging The World

For years and years, we had a small inflatable globe aboard. It was a $6 impulse buy from a toy shop along our route, and you could tell. Place names were frequently misspelled, and colour fills didn't always match their intended borders. But we had drawn our route on the globe, and it was fun to twirl and look at where we had been.

Alas, our $6 globe was only $6 worth of robust, and developed a leak. It was now a sad deflated thing, sitting in a corner and waiting for me to consign it to the Great Map Collection in the Sky.

And now I can.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Like all good moms, my screensaver scrolls through my photo folder. And since I've taken a thousandfold more pictures on this trip than I did in all the years that preceded it, most of the pictures that flicker past are boat-related.

It would be easy to slide down into the caramel-coated Pit of Nostalgia every time I see how utterly adorable the girls were when we started out. I mean, look at this:

Smashing the squee-meter

But, lately, those early-day photos remind me of what a huge mental adjustment we had to make to succeed as cruisers. Erik was coming off years of constant travel and round-the-clock work. Stylish was in school full-time. Indy and I darted between swimming lessons, music group, library storytime, and all of the other activities that fill a city toddler's days. In short, we were people with a schedule, and we knew how to keep it.

Park It

I spend a lot of time with the kids at the park. But I'm the first the admit that "going to the park" isn't always as fun as it sounds. On a good day, it means the kids and I trek out to New Farm Park for a half day playing in the two-storey spider web among the banyans. On a bad day, it means we steal half an hour on the sad scrap of undeveloped land squeezed between the dock, the parking lot and the marina office.

Lately, Erik and I have been beset by Guilty Feelings regarding the kids. For although one of our family mottoes is "You Get What You Get and You Don't Get Upset,"* let's be fair. We're six weeks behind schedule. The girls are stuck in a marina with a total lack of other children, an excess of biting flies, and two increasingly cranky parents. The odd outing to New Farm isn't really cutting it anymore.

And so Erik hatched a Cunning Plan.

You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue

First, a very happy belated Star Wars Day to you all. May the Fourth be with you! We celebrated by watching The Empire Strikes Back. (We try to observe the most important days in the calendar. Raise the kids up right.)

Once again, I've been slow to blog. And I have heard your complaints. I submit two reasons for my poor performance, namely a) we have been working nonstop to get the boat ready and I just don't have it in me to write after ten long hours of manual labour, and b) I have been following the principle of If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Don't Say Anything At All. We have spent the last two weeks wandering through the valley of the shadow of death. Everything broke. Nothing worked. A horde of tiny biting flies invaded. I reached epic levels of crabbiness. You would not have wanted a blow-by-blow.

But now, finally, we're getting there. Sure, the cockpit is still cushionless and full of junk, but Erik has built new shelves to stow all that stuff and new cushions sit below, awaiting only a clean surface on which to rest. The salon overflows with milk crates, but the new tool bench will absorb most of that. And so on. We have reached that point in the refit journey when we can crack open one eye to peak at the future. To ponder sandy beaches, clear snorkelling and our next port of call. To break the seal on the guide books.

Getting in the Water Again, Again

Last week, the marina Travelift parked around Papillon. The operators adjusted the straps, picked up the boat and drove her to the water's edge. We climbed aboard and were lowered into the murky Brisbane River. And once we splashed down, Erik and I inspected the boat.

We found four leaks.

Masks & Fire

Cruising has a lot of positives. You become more flexible. You learn to live simply. You slow down. But these mental shifts have their drawbacks. Primarily, you (read: I) lose all perspective about what "normal life" looks like. Cruisers live in a world where you wake up in the morning, discover the local conga festival is starting, and spend a happy day admiring costumes and eating meat-on-a-stick. There is no planning. There are no logistics. Wake, discover, enjoy. That's it.

The problem comes when you return to regular life with a regular schedule. Suddenly, your vacations have to be planned - ahead of time and everything. Book travel, book hotels, try not to cringe when you think of eating restaurant meals for a week. And not only do you have to plan, but your years on the boat have given you a warped notion of what a vacation should look like. There will be no beach holiday at an all-inclusive. There will be no Disneyland. No, what you are looking for is more along the lines of sitting in the grass under an umbrella and hanging out with the locals. Hopefully with a snappy dance number.

Moving the Boat, Part 3: Midnight Encounters

It has been said that women let the memory of childbirth fade very quickly; if they didn't they would never have another baby. So too with this passage. Although I know very well the whole thing was a pain in the neck, a short month later and the sharp edges are fading. I'm still not in a hurry to do another passage any time soon, but the months will go by and soon I will only remember the good parts. By then it will be time to hop aboard once more.

So let's review the highlights before they fade completely, shall we?

Moving the boat, part 1: Noumea

It was tough to choose the first photo for this post. On the one hand, most of our time in Noumea looked like this:

Not a holiday.

The Papillon Question

I spent the day confirming plane tickets and stuffing underwear into a bag. Why? Because it is time, people. Time to return to Papillon. Our good old Papioni-pepperoni.

Not permanently. No, that would be too much to ask. Erik is still firmly in the grip of his work addiction, so we'll have to ride out the land life for a few months longer. However, the good people of Nouvelle-Calédonie are ready to be rid of our fine vessel, so it is time to jump aboard and sail the boat to Brisbane.

Peanut, Peanut Butter

This morning I fulfilled the usual family breakfast orders. A bowl of Sultana Bran for Indy (Raisin Bran to those of you ten time zones away), cheesy scrambled eggs for Stylish, and a slice of peanut butter toast for me. I noticed the peanut butter was getting pretty low, so I looked in the pantry for another jar. No peanut butter. I started to hyperventilate, then I had a heart attack and died.

Not really. But I could have. This is a disaster; I was sure I had one more jar. In fact, I'm going to go check again right now.

I'm back. No peanut butter. "Amy," I hear you saying, "stop being so dramatic. Get off your keister and go buy some more." Well, smarty pants, I can't. Because there isn't any. There is no more peanut butter on this island. And who knows when more will arrive?