Up And Down Mountains Named "Beer"

I huffed and puffed my way up the trail. I had forgotten how little I like walking uphill. I assume this is some sort of self-preservation mechanism, because I get marched up mountains with depressing regularity. Erik and I, sadly, are walking-incompatible. I can walk forever on flat or gently rolling terrain. And I enjoy it. But when things get steep, the fun factor drops dramatically. Erik, on the other hand, hates walking on flat land.  This is because he is secretly a mountain goat. The steeper the grade, the happier he is, and he will gladly spend a day (or weekend, or month) skipping from crag to crag, pausing only to land in the odd cow pat.

We were exploring the Glass House mountains north of Brisbane. The mountains are old lava plugs, exposed when the softer sandstone around them eroded away. Which is cool - who wouldn't like to hike on a hunk of frozen mantle? We tried to get the girls excited about going to the mountains, but whether they were jaded from years of visiting impressive landscapes or just tired after yet another weekend of birthday fun, they played it cool.

Beat The Heat

Back in the day, we lived in a house.  Unlike Kiwi and Aussie houses, which tend to be low and spreading, Canadian houses go up and up.  And in a Southern Ontario summer, things got hot upstairs.  Our family room was on the third floor, and it was positively melting when the thermometer crept above 30 degrees Celsius. 

Except, we had air conditioning.  It was a power-wasting luxury, but, being home with small kids, I loved it.  It was hard to adjust correctly - you were always too cold in one place and too warm in another - but we didn't much mind.  One did have to be careful, though; one summer, the a/c broke down while we were at the cottage.  Sadly, our fish tank was situated at the top of the house, and, by the time we got back, the fish had liquefied. We moved Fish Tank Mark II down to the second floor with better results.

When we moved aboard Papillon, we had a tiny plug-in air conditioner, much like the window-mount units people often have in apartments.  The first time Erik and I tried to wrestle it into the companionway for the night, we managed to drop it on my leg.

Yes, it hurt just as much as you think it did.

And that's the last time I remember using it.  Which is good; we were young and foolish in those days, and had no concept of just how much power an air conditioner would steal on a boat.

We sold the air conditioner when the opportunity arose, and happily sailed through the topics without it.  Sure, it was hot, but we were in bathing suits most of the time, and swimming all day long.  Who needs a/c?

In New Zealand, we had the opposite problem, and had to fire up the diesel heater to fight the damp and cold.  But in Australia, it is hot.  Really, really hot.  Erik reports that, when the wind starts blowing where he works, it feels like walking around in front of a hair dryer.  Even here in town it gets hot; we took a drive through the Adelaide Hills on the weekend, and this sign caught my eye.

That's 96.8 Fahrenheit, people.

Last week we had a few hot nights, which did not help the precarious sleeping situation around here.  I mentioned this on a call to my parents.

"Don't you have an air conditioner?" asked my dad.

Oh.  Yes.  Yes, actually, we do.  I'd forgotten all about it.

(Indy just asked me what an air conditioner is.  I pointed out the unit in our apartment and explained its function.  "Oh," she said.  "I thought that was a hand dryer.")

Later that morning, the maintenance man for our building came through the apartment to check on a few things.  We chatted about the rising temperatures, and he was horrified to discover that I hadn't even turned the unit on yet.  This was a serious breach of protocol.  He abandoned his work to give me a quick overview, and to set the air conditioner to a decent temperature.

He told me - quite seriously - that 19 C was the way to go.  That sounded a little frosty to me, but who am I to ignore expert advice?  So, we set the unit to 19 C, and the day went on.

I quickly began to lose feeling in my fingers.  I turned the controller to 20 C.  I still craved a sweater.  21.  No good.  22.  23.  At 24 C, the girls and I agreed that things were becoming comfortable.  Instead of an artic blast, we had a cool trickle pouring out of the unit above the couch.  People could sit below it without a blanket.  Just right.

But, even though it sometimes feels like Hell's foyer out here, we are still trying to enjoy the great outdoors.  We spent our weekend at the local park:

Stylish on the zipline.

Mom, I'm not getting anywhere.

So much climbing goodness.

The beach:

Sand!  We never get to play in the sand!

Lunch, now with extra sand.

We looked for wildlife, but this was as close as we got:

And, sometimes, we just sat around and made hats:

What else do you do with old envelopes?

A pretty good couple of days, at any temperature.

Papillon Photographs the Loch Ness Monster

Over the past 27 months living aboard Papillon, I’ve taken a lot of photos.  Many thousands.  The counter on my Fujifilm flipped back around to 0000 last summer.  And while I only own a little point-and-shoot, I’d like to think I’ve learned a little, and have taken a few decent photos in my day.

Sigh.

We are on our way down the east coast of the North Island, showing Erik’s parents the sights.  We’ve just been day sailing, but it has been a fun change for us to sail for a few hours at a time like normal people, instead of hauling up anchor and not putting it down again for at least ten days.

As we came around the tip of Cape Brett, we passed the Hole in the Rock, and the many, many tour boats that surround it.  And it was neat.

Yep, there's a hole in there, all right.

But when we passed the rock, we saw something jumping out of the water.  It was too big and too splashy to be a dolphin.  And it was surrounded by boats.

Ohmygoshitsawhale!

Now, lookit.  I’ve lived on this scrap of floating aluminum for years now, and we’ve put a lot of whaleless miles under the keel.  So you will forgive us if we on Papillon kind of lost our cool for a while there.  The other boats slowly left, and we sailed silently by.  The boat was rocking, but I’m the photography master now, right?  Well, not so much.  Because, while the actual experience of seeing a humpback whale calf smack its fins against the water and jump into the sky was really cool, my photos were ridiculous.  Most of my shots are of the jib or the rail.  The few whale pictures I managed are not only off-centre, but are so blurry as to be unrecognizable.  I could have been taking shots of an innertube in a backyard pool.  How bad was it?  Here are my two absolute best shots.

Humpback whale calf at play.  No, really.

You see that splash?  The breach that preceeded it was so cool, I'm telling you.

Yeah.

So, on we went to Whangamumu.  We dropped the anchor, the girls pulled on their wetsuits, and someone looked over the side.

Ohmygoshitsapenguin!

Holy cats, it's a penguin!

How dare you doubt the veracity of my crappy pictures?  It's a penguin, I say!

Yes, I know those shots are as bad as the whale ones.  But for serious and no lie, we had a penguin swimming around our boat.  Friends, the water is COLD here, and that’s a fact.  The girls invited me in with them, but I politely declined.  Where does cold water get fun?  It doesn’t. I prefer my blood to continue circulating to my extremities, thank you.

We’re in Mimiwhangata now.  No whales or penguins today, but who knows what will come next when we continue to Great Barrier Island?  And this time, I’ll try to keep it all in focus.

Spring Roundup, or, What Are You People Doing Out There?

A brief glance over my recent posts highlights a deficiency: I’ve given you, dear reader, precious little information about what we are currently doing on Papillon.  Not that I was ever very forthcoming on that score, but I think a brief overview is in order.

We have been in Mexico at Isla Mujeres for almost two months now.  That is a very long time, and certainly our record. 

Midway through, we took a trip to see friends, taking us through Villahermosa and Mexico City.  We ate pain chocolat, and lived a civilized life.

Mmm!  Breakfast chocolate!

We did land-type things: attended birthday parties, bounced on trampolines, participated in fashion shows.  You know - kids' stuff.

You try and give me princess makeup, I'm gonna break your face.

Runway model Stylish

And here we now are, all back onboard.  Erik is back to fixing water makers and outboard engines.  I’m back to... well, doing what I was doing, but with another adult onboard.  The girls are delighted to have Daddy back, although Indy has made him pay for it.  While he was away, she would try to talk to him via the VHF: “Daddy, stop working and come home, okay Daddy?”, but once he was back for good, she gave him the cold shoulder to show just how mad she was that he left.  Stylish has a longer memory of Daddy as a Working Man; although she was very sad when he went away, experience told her he was coming back.

Apropos of nothing, here is a video I took of flying dancers outside the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (not to be missed, people).  Watch carefully, the flute player and drummer are spinning, too!

We were at the museum to do some research on the Maya before visiting Tulum (cool) and Coba (so much cooler).  Tikal will come later.  Because living on the boat is all about field trips!  Here is Stylish booting up a pyramid at Coba like a super-fit mountain goat.

Run, Stylish, run!

As I write, we are preparing to head south to Belize.  Yes, it is time to set sail once again.  I am armed with some fancy new seasickness medication, banned in the US, which I’m hoping will finally kick my headaches to the curb.  Hooray!  This also means that we are losing our internet connection.  But, fear not, we will still have very brief text-based email via the ham radio.  I may send the odd blog post out into the ether that way, but the photos will have to wait.  In any case, I am still glad to get your questions and comments; I makes me feel less like I am writing to myself.

Until we meet again, dear reader!

Good news, bad news

"Yeah, the blog is getting a little dry, isn't it?"
Well.  It seems my posts of late have failed to impress my bunkmate (and oh, the ingratitude! See if he gets another post in his honour.) Not that he doesn't have a point. Back in the chilly days of October, it was easy to be funny in a slipping-on-a-banana-peel kind of a way. As a person utterly new to sailing and, let's face it, hardship of any sort, it wasn't difficult to find things to grouse about.  My long-ago stint in Germany and working though the joys of the work permit system gave me practice in turning my teeny-tiny trials into something amusing. And, voila!  Instant blog.  It introduced a necessary element of schadenfreude to this enterprise: you, my dear readers, were far less likely to turn away in disgust from my privileged account of my two-year sabbatical if there were difficulties along the way. And there were. Many.

The bad news for you is that now we are in a warm place. And let me tell you, even higher on my list of peeves than laundry that does not dry is being cold.  This is a bad thing for someone from Canada, and played no small part in my agreeing to this adventure.  Erik can confirm that I spend much of my life below room temperature.  In a cage fight between the laws of physics and my icy hands of death, you should definitely put the milk money on me.

I've drifted off topic.  Point: cold = bad.  Cold = Amy indulging in great pessimism.  But when the sun shines... ahh, then, my friends, everything looks rosy.  The anchor is dragging and we're drifting onto a shoal in the middle of the night during a sudden storm?  In the Chesapeake, I may have just had a heart attack and had done with it.  When in happened in Key West a week ago?  Oh, gosh.  I'd better skip on over and get that anchor up then!  La de dah de dah!  And I did, and we repositioned, and then there was a parade with rainbows and puppies and everyone got free chocolate.  Or so it felt like.

Still drifting off topic.  My point is really this.  The bad news for you, for me, and for this little blog, is that nothing crummy is as funny in the sunshine.  I don't feel as rotten about it, so I can't complain effectively, so you don't get the same thrill for not living on this boat, and can feel all snug and secure at home even though it is -52 Celsius and eight meters of snow have fallen in the past ten minutes.  Unless I can make you say, "Ha ha!  My furnace is costing me $400/minute, but at least I'm not on Papillon!", then I have failed at my job.

Well.  Now.  My chickadees, I promise you, trials and tribulations lie in store!  We haven't stopped fixing dead engines during the night.  We still find ourselves surrounded by cruise ships and freighters at 2am, wondering how we are going to cross the Gulf Stream without getting creamed, and are those two little sets of lights actually one tug-and-tow waiting to de-mast us with its tow cable?  Dangers abound!  Annoyances proliferate!  And as soon as I get accustomed to this lovely Bahamian weather, I'll once again be glancing at the sky with heavy-lidded eyes and a sneer, asking, "what have you done for me lately?"

But, to tide you over until I regain my customary pessimism, I present to you this short list of reasons you can be happy you are not me.

I Am Happy I am Not Frolicking in the Bahamas on Papillon Because:
1.  I don't have to toilet-train a two-year-old on heavy seas in a bathroom the size of a linen closet.
2.  I don't have to listen to Erik and the girls invent highly dubious rhymes all day long.  (If I have to hear Indy say, "Domo arigato for scratching my botto" one more time...).  Note to future teachers of Indy and Stylish: send all vocabulary complaints directly to my husband.
3.  I don't have to haul a man >1.5 times my weight up the mast to fix things.  And let him down gently again.
4.  No one shakes my shoulder at 2am to say, "It's your watch.  Wake me in two hours."
5.  I don't have to be the only sufferer of seasickness amongst a Crew Without Pity.
6.  If I forget to buy something at the store, I can get it tomorrow.  Supplies are less than a dinghy ride/two-mile walk/tiny grocery store/cab ride/dinghy ride away.
7.  I have more than one functional electrical outlet.
8.  I don't have to re-prime my toilet every time I go somewhere.

There.  That should do for a while.  So, feel good in your life choices, friends.  And don't pity me as I collect conch shells on the beach again tomorrow.  Tra la la!  I'll be back to my grim self soon enough.