Santiago’s Bodega

Our very good friend Gary and his wife Barbara bought us a retirement dinner at Santiago's Bodega, the notoriously delicious tapas restaurant on Petronia Street at the corner of Emma. 

I like their Portuguese wines the whites tend to be tart and fruity and light and especially delicious when you see the rich food. However their sangria comes in red and white and we usually go there for the festivtive flavor of fruit and wine. We chose red.

The gazpacho cup was fresh and peppery but the shrimp bisque was really divine, as our server Sam assured us it would be. 

We both knew Sam from various exercise classes, and I really like her work ethic. She is a thin and flexible blond with none of the attributes of the bad jokes. She made our evening extra special and it was a nice way to say good bye.

We reserved outdoor seats after Layne's doctor approved eating outdoors as safe for her immune system. Dr Ritter is an unusually cautious  doctor so an outdoor table was surprisingly do-able. We did it.

"Fierce potatoes" aren't Layne's favorites but I am fond of tubers and to get them all roasted and creamy and spicy and mixed in with peppers and olives makes them perfect.  Papas bravas every time. 

The quesadillas are crisps of cheese with a sweet and cheesy topping. Very rich and very filling. 

Mushroom puffs because puff pastry and mushrooms can't be beat...except by those potatoes!

Rack of lamb.

We haven't eat since June when we met friends at the outdoor tables at Off the Hook on Caroline Street.

Happily Santiago's didn't miss a beat and the evening escape from packing boxes was well worth while.

Bread pudding was an extravagance, a sugary brioche with ice cream.

I have no idea how to smile for the camera but I enjoyed playing with my iPhone mini.

Parking was crap as always so we walked two blocks to the car which in point of fact was no bad things as the food needed to be settled. 

I don't know how some people eat out every night. Aside from the expense the rich flavors packed with salt and fats and exaggerations that make an occasional indulgence memorable, would make me dyspeptic.

A glance up Petronia Street, then a  short walk down Emma Street and finally home.

San Andres 1999

So there we were living the idyll in the San Blas islands of Panama, however the purser had been on the satellite phone from Corazon de Jesus, the twin village to Rio Diablo and the news from the bank was not great. These days my wife has all our banking and credit cards and auto pay accounts linked through our bank account. In those distant days there was no now online to tell us our plans were mad so we took off on the first available weather window. Tom on Thundercloud agreed and that encouraged me as he was a long time western Caribbean sailor. However like all idiots I ignored his very sage advice that I have since then never forgotten. In the Caribbean keep north and west of your intended target. That's because  frontal weather comes from the north and east and will push you home. Silly me I laid a rhumb line to San Andres on the lovely southeast breeze and off we went.

We had two nights and a day to get across the western Caribbean, the idea being we would arrive earlier in the day and have plenty of time to find the pass through the reef and then locate the clearing in officials. It would have been brilliant had I followed the sage's advice. He took the southeast breeze and promptly buggered off due north as though aiming for Jamaica. We streaked on a straight line northwest towards the tiny dot of Columbian land off the coast of Nicaragua. San Andres and Providencia have been fought over by Colombia and Nicaragua after the pirates who actually inhabited Providencia Island were kicked out. Providencia in English is known as Old Providence and was a real pirate haunt in the 18th century as it launched raiders right across the path of the bullion convoys traveling from Portobello got Havana where they staged to sail to Spain. I finally learned why Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas is located on New Providence Island. That's because after they were kicked out of Old Providence they fled north and established a base whence they could harass the convoys after they left Havana bound for Cadiz. Key West never was a pirate base sorry to say. On Tom's routing plan it's too far west to catch the gallons leaving Havana.

These are pictures I took with my rapidly failing film camera after we landed in San Andres. That's because the journey there turned into a version of one of Dante's circles of hell and I ad no time for frivolities. In the middle of the night Layne woke me from a deep and dreamless sleep to inform me the wind instrument was being very odd. It sure was: boat speed was rocketing in concert with increasing wind speeds. One thing about the catamaran was that the roof over the cockpit gave protection to the person driving but by the same token judging conditions especially at night was harder to do without instruments. What followed was one of those ghastly fire drills, happily on the broad flat heaving deck of our boat with two hulls, as I put two reefs in the main and rolled up the foresail. Boat speed barely dropped and we roared off, more or less under control towards San Andres, hard on the wind crashing through waves with the wind howling and tossing buckets of cold seawater over the fiberglass canopy above the wheel. Debs was in bed with Layne bouncing like a trampoline, Emma was in her spot on the bench in the cockpit behind me never complaining as we got hosed by cold seawater thrown by the howling winds. After a couple of hours I figured the boat wasn't going to break and we might live through this nightmare. I check our course and naturally there was a cluster of small island across our path, owned by Colombia and occupied by soldiers according to our guide book. Indeed after I wiped salt spray off my eyes I spotted the properly winking light on the horizon putting us on a. safe course. All I had to do now was monitor everything and try to keep us pointing far enough north not to kiss the seven mile long island. As I recall the instruments recorded top speeds of 13 knots but we never went below eight which are bicycle speeds but we were carrying our home with us. Through water with next to no sails aloft. It was exhilarating once I figured I wasn't going to drown.

The navigational problem was that if we missed San Andres in the darkness we would sail into a maze of sandbars, islands, mangroves and uncharted perils of all sorts on the infamous Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. In these winds we would surely crash and once past San Andres there was no way we could sail back. We were plowing at high speed into the bottom of a very painful sack, a lee shore in sailing terminology, and I absolutely had to hit San Andres fair and square. We had a primitive GPS but I spent hours peering through binoculars looking for the lighthouse in the murk. Happily as the photos show all was well. Funnily enough as we sailed into the calm waters under the protective hook of the north shore Thundercloud rolled up and Tom hailed us cheerily. His wandering off to the north gave him an easy downwind sail with never a drop of salt water in the boat; I was a drowned rat. We arrived at the same time. Confirmation I was an idiot. 

In 1999 Colombia was a mess rife, with drug traffickers, FARC guerrillas and hijacking and kidnapping were rife along the highways. San Andres was completely safe and peaceful, because we were told, the cartels declared it a safe zone for, of all things, their vacations. They split the calendar up between their factions and life here went on tranquilly like any other place in the Caribbean. Luckily for us it turned out, as we were stuck here for a couple of weeks, hemmed in by the cold front that frothed up the sea outside the reef. It was an expensive stop as we replaced camera and laptop here through a Dutch guy who married a local and ran an electronics shop in town, a resource for all passing sailors. He ordered stuff from Bogota and his electronics flew in with the vacationing Colombian cartels and their families. The airport was massive and modern to make the drug lords' flights as smooth as possible, I guess. We stayed at anchor in the harbor next to a little uninhabited island that gave me a place to walk the dogs close by on rainy days and there were many of those. As you can see Emma and Debs took every place they went in their stride. As long as they were off leash they presented no threat and the locals ignored them. A leashed dog meant danger (why else would you hang on to it?) and cleared the sidewalks. They never came to any harm in defiance of all the Facebook worry warts you can read about these days. I think they like us, had the time of their lives. I expect Rusty will too.

It rained, God it rained. It was more of the rainy season we had endured in Costa Rica and Panama. Rainy days in Key West remind me of these tropical downpours we endured while sailing. You can't stop living because of rain so we went ashore, walked the dogs into a coma then left them aboard and took tours while they slept. By he time we got back I had to drive them back to the docks for anther walk around town. I must have walked miles every day. In the morning I walked the main sea trail on the eastern shore, a broad sidewalk resembling Smathers Beach except they had little coffee carts which sold hot sweet mild Colombian coffee and fried pastries, savory with meat and sweet with cheese and guava. Luckily I was walking so much and getting exercise because dollars bought me many pastries. Best dog walks ever! Colombians in our experience save their strong dark beans for foreigners and seem to prefer a light mild coffee for themselves. This suited me just fine but other cruisers were disappointed they couldn't get rot gut black coffee in Colombia.

We had no Internet in those days of dial up e-mail and lost connections but we had books and DVDs and we organized a bus tour with an English speaking guide who led us around the island which is seven miles long north to south, and a coupe of miles wide with a hilly spine down the middle separating the east from the west coast. There was a coast road all the way round and as we drove up the east side I looked out at the water where I had sailed in a few days earlier. I remembered the relief of landing my family in exactly the right spot. I could see school buses chugging up the coast road past brightly colored houses and churches surrounded by bright flowers and coconut palms. I was filled with relief. In Key West when I looked at Smathers Beach from the water I remembered my landfall in San Andres after that stormy night. There is a saying among mortal sailors "I'd rather be in here wishing I were out there, than out there wishing I were in here." 

We played tourists, we ate Colombian food, much like other Central American countries where three dollars bought you rice, vegetables meat and fish and in Colombia they have a tradition of soup to start with, which was unexpected and much enjoyed. Its not worth cooking Layne the chef grumbled as we sat on the sidewalk protected by the dogs sipping soup. We also went to the movies in a glorious old single screen theater. many theaters at least in those days all across Central America showed American films in English with Spanish subtitles. We got scared rigid at a showing of Sixth Sense, the supernatural movie that came at us out of nowhere. We had never heard of it or had any expectation of the plot and we spent the darkness clutching each other like a row of schoolchildren, not seasoned sailors. I see dead people, that unforgettable line struck us rather harder than the joke line it became later. I think there is something very naive and wholesome in an old fashioned way about traveling by boat.  You revert whether you realize it or not to a simpler time. Perhaps you don't any more but we did. We were alone in our circle of strangers and we helped each other out without thinking and without expectations. To me it was a tranquil time and the movie reminded us of the complexities and social demands of life back home.

San Andres itself was a place out of time. Colombians could only live there by special permission from the government. I guess everyone would have liked to move there to escape the civil war but they couldn't. You'd think maybe that wouldn't be a bad rule for the Keys! People who did live there were trapped on a tiny island with limited facilities and we who were visiting soon got bored by the limitations of life.

Its a fact that every time we put down an anchor and settled into a life "on the hook" we tended to be glad to have arrived. Yet always after a few days or several days or many days a switch clicked in our brains and suddenly we were ready to go. If we left too soon we regretted not staying, but if, after that switched clicked we stayed we got progressively more antsy and frustrated. The weather hemmed us in and soon coffee and pastries for breakfast lost their appeal. The streets started to look the same with duty free watches and stands filled with fruit that so enchanted us at first. The dogs did fine, meeting the locals and living such full lives they filled the boat with the sound of snoring at night.

Finally the winds let up a bit, the skies remained leaden and gray but it was time to go. Tom got this picture of me ready to drive outside the reef and head north along what was actually the most dangerous stretch of our journey though we had no idea at the time. I was anxious to thread the Mosquito Coast, a mysterious land of literature rarely visited by cruising sailors. 

Miki G, a Gemini catamaran model 105M, 34 feet long, 14 feet wide with an 18 inch draught with a five foot centerboard in each hull. Displacing 7500 pounds we always sailed on the waterline and the boat was a joy to sail. Too lightweight they told us in California, but we found the boat tough as nails with an even worse storm between Cuba and Key West proving that point to us. The lilac sail covers were Layne's idea in case you didn't guess already.

Driving Miami

We left the house late yesterday morning and had one of the worst rides I can remember on US 1. An unloaded Miami tow truck waltzed from Marathon to Tavernier at 35 miles per hour developing a line of road rage over the horizon behind us. I was four cars behind him and unable to pass thanks to oncoming traffic,  though his driving did send two drivers into the danger zone passing in median lanes, which if caught, gets a reckless ticket no questions asked. I admired their nerve. The problem with amblers on the highway especially when driving a flying barn like the Promaster is the car behind gets impatient with the slowpoke van and the risk of being rear ended is ever present. I drove 40 miles with a car glued to my rear bumper as though the delay were my fault  and all I could do was hope for the best and curse the endless stream of oncoming traffic. The day did get better...

My wife was the chef d'orchestre as is usual when we visit The Big City so we zipped from Robert Is Here for lunchtime smoothies as usual...I did happen to notice this vaguely precise Awful Warning dangling from the fence as I trailed Rusty. It rather reminded me to beware of heffalumps.

We somehow managed once again to avoid heffalump traps inherent to buying food at an agritourism establishment and went on our merry way to the storage locker. It took me four trips up to the second floor to deliver three loads of boxes on our dolly. This was because I forgot the keys to the padlock on my first trip and had to make an extra round trip to get into the infernal chamber. Sweaty work overseen by Rusty who  sat in the driving seat and watched and approved of me opening up his space on the bed.  

We went to Target to return needed packing materials and some other stuff whose details escape me. Layne decided to add the money to our cash pile for Mexican travel. I wandered around the parking lots with a sniffing dog hence the apparently random pictures of trees and shrubs and buildings.

The boxes are gone and though order was not entirely restored Rusty staked his claim immediately. He has made the van his home at last and runs for his bed in the van at the slightest growl of thunder when he is in the driveway watching the world go by.

Layne had to make a last visit to see Dr Ritter at the Rheumatology center. I'm not sure how this happened but her arthritis after 25 years residence appears to have gone into remission, just in time for her to get off the drugs and hopefully get a successful vaccination. The afternoon, though rainy, brightened up considerably when the doctor could detect no signs of swelling or inflammation. Quite the surprise.

I was allowed up to the office after a walk with Rusty around the the block so I got my chance to say goodbye to the good doctor who himself suffers from Rheumatoid arthritis. I used to come out of the consulting room in the days before Covid to a roomful of patients and wave my fingers and thank him loudly for curing me. Arthritis of this sort is a bastard disease of endless suffering and I figured give 'em hope. Never a truer word spoken in jest. Only thing is, the waiting room is Covid empty these days and no one was there to see Layne's miracle.

Dr Ritter the workaholic seemed fascinated by the idea of an open ended journey though he wagged his finger in warning about not going south where danger lies. Said the lifelong Miami resident though probably not resident in the drive by shooting neighborhoods. If he only knew our plans Layne said to me after we were out of hearing. Better say nothing or give him a heart attack. We will send him a postcard from Patagonia when they can't hold us responsible for the outcome. (He doesn't do electronics).

Travel is always a series of goodbyes, and to my fevered imagination travel resembles death inasmuch as here today and vanished tomorrow. Of course it's not as serious as we will be back and most probably after Alaska next year but the bonds are slipping with a mixture of excitement and sadness. 

After the doctor we crossed the street and ordered a Jamaican dinner, curried goat for Layne and curried chicken for me from a hole in the wall we've been visiting forever.  We had beef patties for old times' sake and they reminded me how good Dion's patties are in the Keys' convenience stores. We sat in the van eating the beef pastries while Rusty chowed down on a dog thing. "I can feel the end closing in," I said to Layne. "Last time here and there." 

Next stop was Lenscrafters in the Falls shopping mall. I'm not a fan of shopping malls but this one is different, an open air tropical walkway alongside a rushing stream of water tumbling between ferns and over rocks creating small waterfalls. Apparently there is new ownership investing in renovations and I was glad to see that one day people will be able to walk through what may be the antithesis of the traditional shopping mall. Hopefully mask free. I wore a mask as I handed over Dr Douville's lens prescription from the Professional Building in Key West. New lenses in my favorite frame (plus a spare) in a week or when next we drive up.

While walking Rusty I passed a left over protestor from the recent burst of Free Cuba marches and flag waving. I have little sympathy for the Cubans who have been given the good life, perhaps the best life, in the US while their fellow Cubans suffer 90 miles away and they can't be bothered to do anything more than wave flags and demand another intervention from the US to get them their properties back. Fidel Castro took his life in his hands and fought for what he wanted and believed in. This lot can't get off their middle class backsides to do the same for what they say they believe in. I can't imagine the hard put upon people of Cuba will ever get rid of the tyranny of the Castros to replace it with the tyranny of these people. Some people never get the breaks and I can't imagine how rough Cubans have it caught between an oppressive past and a no hope future. Meanwhile the Miami Cubans live well and complain. I have no desire to go back where I came from and I have an irrational belief they should feel the same way.

Our last stop on our shopping trip was Petsmart naturally. Rusty needs (needs?) a van sized bed and he gets to choose it. I followed Layne's directions and led Rusty to the bed section. He is like me and knows what he likes. The model he laid down in was the same as the ones at home. Only this time Layne got a slightly smaller size thank heavens and he slept in it all the way home so it passed the Rusty test and should be easier to handle in the small van space. Meanwhile 90 miles away people have to queue to buy staple foods. The unfairness of life seems insurmountable to me.

It's going to be a problem on the road but I shall have to harden up. I keep reminding myself suffering is everywhere even when I am not there and it will be after I pass through. Insurmountable. But there is beauty too.

At least he's where he wants to be:

The Packing Grind

These are not, I fear the days of great blog posts but bear with me as I have to use the material I have to hand and these days it's all about choice. Does it come with us? Do we store it in the locker in Miami for future use? Do we sell it? Do we toss it? These are not thirty days that shook the world, but I will tell you this need for continuous unending decision-making gives you a taste for how much of our normal lives we live on autopilot. I took a break to read Bad Land by Jonathan Raban. I read his book Coasting years ago when I lived on my boat in Santa Cruz and absorbed sailing by proxy. Webb Chiles recommended Bad Land when I talked of crossing that part of the country to drive to Alaska. The lives of English émigré would-be farmers is stark and a fascinating review of the immigrant fables as told as part of the myth of westward migration.

Unfortunately it doesn't take Layne long to finish her project and we're back at it. A complete set of pots and pans to be photographed for instance, is the next chore. She posts them on Facebook. On Sunday she sold our outdoor furniture to a man with an SUV who hauled away what was in effect our dining room in two trips. Our first Instapot is sold. The utility trailer used to haul motorcycles is sold. On and on the list goes. My preferred method would be to get a dumpster delivered and toss everything off the balcony. But I would be wrong; I think we might have made enough to keep us in Mexico for three months this winter so there's proof positive I'm an idiot. An impatient idiot.

We bundled our winter clothes and packed them alongside proper walking boots in a space not instantly accessible under the bed. The idea is when we reach frigid regions we will pull out knit caps, scarves, long underwear and heavy socks to deal with the cold, but until then we shall exist in an optimistic Spring of not too heavy clothes until the weather tells us, by force, we are no longer in the Keys.

My other clothes, and I do own some long pants by the way, are reduced to four bags which required some decision making. Do you want this or that...? I am the despair of the fashion conscious.

Happily the bags fit in the overhead bins on my side of the back of the van. The two bins on my side are smaller because the original dimensions mean I couldn't sit up so we went back to Custom Coach Creations in Deland for a re-do, and they rebuilt the boxes a little smaller so my seated frame will fit underneath without giving me a headache. $600 well spent. The little green patch masks the join where the liner was cut behind the old bins. They do a nice job in Deland.

As we demolish the house we practice storage for the van. Luckily we took the time to vacation last year in Michigan and those experiences gave us a chance to test ideas we had. Layne has been revamping her pantry as a result. And I am carrying boxes of spices and sauces up and down the stairs. One important thing for us to remember, and we sometimes forget, is that unlike sailing we will be traveling this time right past supermarkets and all manner of stores as we go, and we have to curb our tendency to picture ourselves away from stuff and thus overthink what we need to carry all the time. 

We pause too in the business of cleaning up when we come across certain stuff, including my old travel wallet (now for sale) with a strange assortment of small bills from Albania, Bosnia, Croatia and Nicaragua. Completely random. Layne says we may well use them and they have gone in the foreign currency drawer, wherever that is. I think it may be a few years before we get to spend two hundred Leks again but I certainly wouldn't mind driving Gannet2 through Albania and seeing what has changed since last time. 

But first we have to pack.

Mangrove Walk

My wife and I have a bet going on. I have high hopes that by the middle of next month I will be a millionaire and Layne will be utterly devastatingly impoverished.  I am confident because I believe we can be all packed up by mid October and there is a million dollar bet riding on this.  If I am wrong and we aren't all packed up by October 12th I shall be bankrupt and Layne will be rolling in it and doubtless mocking my optimism.

Packing up a life in preparation for a transition is an illustration of diminishing returns. The closer you get to the conclusion the more crap you find lurking in the corners of your life. I am already looking around for a hauler with a pick up truck for hire to load up bigger stuff and transport it to the dump on the other side of Cudjoe. My wife looks at me with astonishment: "I can sell that!" she insists. She can too. 

We were going to the bank on Big Pine Key to notarize one more moving document to set up a mail forwarding service. Oh good, Layne said, we can sell the Crocs. In a fit of absentmindedness Layne had bought me two pairs of size 12 Crocs, only they were in womens' sizes. Who knew there was a woman's size 12? She posted them on Facebook and we had a buyer. We arranged to meet in the bank parking lot. It was a scene from a spy novel as we lurked in the car watching vehicles pull up at First State Bank, wondering which one was the buyer. Soon enough a small black car dislodged an impressively tall black man, apparently quite flexible. We smiled at each other as in this age of Covid I stayed on my side of his car and slid the shoes across while he slipped me two tightly folded 20 dollar bills. We each sloped off from the parking lot in different directions.

The walls of our home are becoming denuded of art. Our pictures collected on various travels are in boxes and there are boxes everywhere. "I may have sold the dressers" is a typical opening gambit in our rather weird conversations. "I can't get the damned shower tray to hold up in the van," might be my typical reply. When we lived on boats we shared pink jobs and blue jobs as we traveled. It was a source of much conversation among sailors, how jobs fell into typical pre-feminist roles among traveling boaters. Layne cooked and I tended the sails. I changed the engine oil and Layne shopped. It was weird but effective. We are going back to pink and blue jobs. Layne cooks and I study the spare tire situation. 

Rusty is handling the chaos quite well. My previous dogs have got stressed by the obvious changes.  I think Cheyenne got dumped at the pound before her former family moved. When we prepared to leave our home on Ramrod Key she got really anxious and I couldn't be out of her sight for a minute until she realized she wasn't being dumped again. Rusty just keeps on as normal as furniture moves and boxes come and go. I like to think he knows how important he is to us.

A new city policy has been announced requiring employees to be vaccinated or to get a weekly PCR Covid test at their own expense. I sent in my vaccination certificate to HR as I am technically on the books until October but I know several of my colleagues are determined anti-vaxxers. That's one of the reasons I'm getting out before Fantasy Fest. A vaccinated Monroe County Commissioner for the Upper Keys died recently after getting the disease that some people call a  hoax. In his obituaries Mike Forster is described as a powerhouse of good, organizing help for the needy in his community and acting like a true leader. I find it deeply disturbing he got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and still suffered a fatal breakthrough infection.

I can't stand the idea that there are swathes of people who can argue with a  straight face against vaccination however I have opted out of the drama. Our plans when we are on the road is to get take out food kerb side, eat in the van and avoid contact as much as possible. At this point we have to patiently wait for Covid to burn itself out because apparently we as a species don't want to help it along.

The weather this September has been lovely so far, yes too hot but also breezy and pleasant. I walk Rusty before dawn and I don't sweat so that's a win. I find it ironic to a degree when I see parts of the country knocked down by hurricanes, tornadoes wildfires and drought while South Florida trudges on as normal pretty much. 

The summer skies are gorgeous with clouds and storms, the colors of the leaves are bright  and I am enjoying the peace and quiet of ultra low tourist season. As seen here:

Dusk in the woods with Rusty. Perfect. Not a moose in sight.