Here it is the day after Christmas, and we are enjoying the 80° weather outside and the 78° temperature of the water in the pool. We’ve been listening to the news of the snowstorms in Canada and the northern part of the U.S., and feeling a little guilty about our own good fortune. The ABC cable channel being shown here is from Buffalo, New York, and every evening we seem to be watching snowplows clearing the streets and listening to talk of schools being closed. You can bet we’re thankful for the opportunity to avoid the cold weather we see there. At worst we have to pull a light blanket over ourselves in the wee hours of the morning to stay warm – and that’s with all the ports and hatches open.
While Sheilagh was gone, I took the opportunity to start getting in shape before making New Year’s resolutions in that regard. I started walking about 4 miles a day on the beach every other day, and alternating that with longer and longer swims in the lap pool. At the present time I’ve worked up to a mile in the water, which is 64 lengths of the pool and a LOT of time in the swimming lane. My stroke starts out pretty well, but gets very ragged by the end. Then I pull myself out of the pool, stumble over to the lounge chair, and get my strength back with a coke and a Snickers bar – seems like a good training regimen to me!
Sheilagh got back to Puerto Vallarta on Monday evening, after waiting more than an hour for the flight to take off. That was the day it was snowing in both Victoria, British Columbia, and in Seattle – something that occurs only every 20 years or so. Her airplane was waiting in San Francisco for flights to come in from the north to connect to her flight to Mexico. In fact the majority of tourists here seem to be from Canada. While US. Citizens can travel south in the United States to get warmer, Canadians seem to grab flights to Mexico – not only for warmth but also to take advantage of the strength of the Canadian dollar against the Mexican peso.
When Sheilagh got back, the full import of her mother’s death finally hit her, and we’ve been keeping a bit of a low profile during this holiday season. However, we did attend a couple of local functions to try to get into the spirit of the season. We attended a dinner and jazz night at the Vallarta Yacht Club, only to find that the jazz was neither Blues nor Dixieland, but that kind of off-the-cuff-rambling which only true jazz cognoscente can appreciate. It hardly needs to be said that we are not of that class of connoisseur.
We also attended the 60th birthday party of Alan (from “Serendipity”) put on by his wife, Rosie, at the Britannia Pub in La Cruz. Since they are British, they felt the party should take place in a British pub. In this case it was “open mike” night, and the bands were quite a bit better than the jazz band we had heard earlier in the week. Another cruising couple, Bill and Colleen (of the sailing vessel “Captain George Thomas”) gave us a ride over and back in their car; so we didn’t have to negotiate two buses going over and a cab ride back. It was an enjoyable evening, particularly when Alan danced in a pair of Wellington sailing boots and a black top hat, along with Rosie in a gorgeous red dress, with steps out of an Irish jig or a sailor’s hornpipe.
As usual we forgot our camera; so we have no pictures of these events. We are enclosing a picture of our boat with its Shade Tree covers, to show how we are handling the warm weather. You’ll notice we have the dinghy hoisted up on the side of the boat to keep the bottom out of the water when we’re not using it. We left the dinghy in the water for about a week, and it took an hour to scrape the tiny barnacles and green algae off the bottom. In an anchorage we hoist the dinghy up to discourage would-be dinghy/outboard “borrowers.” We’ve had no trouble yet, but it always pays to be careful. To steal our dinghy someone would have to climb up on our boat, cut the halyard, find a key, and then eventually get a cable cutter to separate the outboard engine and gas tank from the dinghy itself. All we have to do is make it a bit more difficult to steal our dinghy than someone else’s dinghy, and so far it’s worked.
Speaking of the dinghy reminds me that we took it up the inlets that thread the area following the path of the jungle cruises that go by us every day loaded with tourists. We were interested in seeing what kind of wildlife exists this close to civilization, and frankly there are warnings everywhere in the estuary to beware of "cocodrillos" (crocodiles), and we thought we might get a look at one. Sheilagh was not so sure she wanted to see one, because she has no confidence in the ability of our hypalon dinghy to withstand the bite of a crocodile, nor of her ability to swim to shore faster than I could to escape. However, all we saw was the iguana pictured above, and we have seen many of those in the past year.We spent a completely relaxed Christmas Day watching old movies, communicating with our children and grandchildren through Skype on the computer, and eating excellent prime rib with apple pie that Sheilagh made. Today we just saw “West Side Story” and are now in the middle of “The Wolf Man” with Lon Chaney. I’m not sure what any of these have to do with Christmas, but they are a great way to avoid work and lay around writing a blog.
More later . . .
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