The smaller boat projects build as we get closer to moving time. We are at the 2 week countdown for relocating Galt over to Ocean World for his holiday stay. It should only be about a 3 or 4 hour sail over to the marina but since we haven’t moved since July, it takes some preparation. Ocean World is pretty much like Walley World in the movie Vacation complete with waterpark, casino and swimming with dolphins. Of course, much like Walley World, all of Ocean World is currently closed except for the marina…Chevy Chase and I are very sad indeed!
Bill has been busy changing all of the fluids on the boat and he managed to complete the tasks with far fewer curse words than his previous attempts so it appears he and the engine room are finally settling into an understanding of some sort. I have been continuing my work on the deck and I found a miracle product that absorbs rust stains (Davis FSR for those who are interested) and it was the best $40.00 I ever spent! I put it on the deck, scrub with a brush and then scrap out any remaining rust with a tiny screwdriver. Galt is looking quite polished and ready to be on adventures again. This week has also been testing my ability to breathe my way through my major phobia in life. What phobia is that, you ask? Is it heights? Snakes? Small spaces? Rats? No. It is ants. I know, I know. They are tiny. You can step on them. They are just ants. Ants terrify me. My earliest nightmares were of ants so perhaps I was eaten by ants in a previous life. In my nightmare, the black ants would be on one side of me and the red ants on the other side and they would battle on my stomach. Then, I would run and wake up my poor mother and she would patiently follow me to my room, turn on the lights and point out the fact that were no ants in my bed. We won’t even discuss the time Mom let us watch Charlton Heston’s Naked Jungle where the 2 mile wide, 20 mile long column of army ants was marching through the villages eating everyone….needless to say, Mom paid for that Saturday matinee with no sleep for years to come! So, yes. I am terrified of ants. So, of course, if we have an infestation on the boat, it is not going to be spiders or roaches, it just has to be ants. Ants are everywhere. In the bed, in the kitchen, on the sofa, in the laundry bag, everywhere! How do ants get on a boat? The only way I can figure out is that they stowed away in the laundry bag on the way back from the marina. Now there are millions of them. Okay, Bill would say maybe 50 to 100 but it feels like millions to me! So, yesterday, I went on a rampage to spray the entire boat with ant killer. After I finished the bedroom, Bill asked, “Did you do the drawers?”…. “Why?” I foolishly ask…. “Because there were a couple of ants in my drawer today.” So, I ventured back down to the bedroom and started removing the clothes from the drawers and spraying them with ant spray. All was well until I got to my bottom drawer. There, hiding among my socks and undies was the motherlode of ants. If you have ever wondered how fast Bill can move when he hears a shrieking scream, the answer is pretty darn fast! The next hour was spent with Bill emptying the drawer and going through each piece of clothing and being my ant murdering hero. I can report that I have sprayed every inch of the boat with the ant killer…..I may die of cancer from ant killer but I most certainly will not die by stomach battling ants! This next week has another trip to Santiago to purchase paint and the final pieces necessary to complete our deck cover. Time is passing quickly but the Dominican does not move quickly so fingers crossed we can get it done! Have a wonderful week and if you’d like to throw up a prayer that my ants are gone....or that Charlton Heston shows up to save us, I would be most appreciative!
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I have not accomplished much this week because I have had a cold. The common cold. I live on a boat in the middle of a bay. I have contact with other humans about 10% of the time. We don’t shake hands anymore and many of them have on masks. We are usually six feet apart. It is over 90 degrees. And yet, I catch a cold. I am now getting ready to give my take on Covid. If you do not care about my take on Covid, then stop reading now. If all of this social distancing and other nonsense cannot stop the common cold, then why do we think it will stop Covid? It has not and it will not. We are trying to control nature and that is a losing battle. People will argue with me, “What if your child dies of Covid? Or your parents?” Valid argument. However, what if my children or parents die of cancer, stroke, heart attack, terrorist attack? Do I stop living life to avoid those possibilities? When my kids were younger, my biggest fear was that they would be hit by a car. I think every parent has one thing that they fear most. My best friend had a fear of her child choking and another had a fear of her child being abducted. For so many years, I worried about something that had such a small chance of happening but it dominated my thoughts. I think that is what we are allowing Covid to do in our lives today. Dominating our thoughts in such a skewed way that the fear factor is far worse than Covid itself. I am not saying that Covid is not a deadly virus that kills people but is it really killing more people than the flu, car accidents, cancer, etc? It would be horrible to lose a loved one to Covid. However, would it be any worse than losing a loved one in any other way? Is a Covid death more devastating than a cancer death? In my eyes, a death is a death. Some might argue that a Covid death is worse because it could have been prevented. I completely disagree. No one can prevent death no matter what the form. At some point, we must go back to living. This morning, the powers-that-be stated that not celebrating Thanksgiving with family would be the best course of action to avoid Covid. Thanksgiving is my family’s biggest holiday. We all look forward to it every year. So, should we cancel it and not spend what time we have left on this earth together? Would being alone on Thanksgiving and possibly not catching Covid be worth the risk that one of our family members might not be here next year? There are no guarantees in life, especially when dealing with life. The old adage that ‘tomorrow never comes’ has been around for years for a reason. In my opinion, the Covid mandates have had the opposite effect than what was intended. Quarantine for healthy people has seen an increase in obesity, anxiety, depression, suicides. We have taken productive societies and shut them down “hoping” to avoid mass contamination which has caused an increase in worldwide poverty. I just cannot fathom the logic in taking perfectly healthy people and putting them in isolation. If you are high risk, take precautions but do not stop living. Life is not a dress rehearsal. We do not get a second chance. If you start to feel anxious today about Covid, turn off the tv and put Covid into perspective. It is a germ. It can make you sick. It could possibly kill you but so can that truck that is barreling through the red light. Live your life today because right now is the only guarantee that you will ever have. Epilogue I rest my case: Just before publishing this blog, I got a text from my daughter. She was at work and got bitten by a rat. Yes, a rat. Does she work in a sewer you ask? No. She works at one of the fanciest restaurants in Charleston where evidently a rat needed to be corralled so, of course, she was in charge. A fact about rats that would have been handy for Kaarin to know prior to grabbing the rat: unlike snakes, you cannot grab them behind the head because they can still move their head and bite you. So, she went to the ER and the bite was infected but thankfully, rats cannot transfer rabies to humans so she just needed an antibiotic. If this situation does not support my previous rant about putting Covid into perspective, nothing does…..So….go live your life because evidently there are rabid rats everywhere…just lurking and waiting to take you out! Not a lot of excitement in boat world this week. We have made gains on all of our boat projects so we have been hard at work but not much material for the blog! As we have been anxiously awaiting the completion of the deck benches, it occurred to me that I had better finish the teak work on the back deck or it would be much harder once the benches are installed. So, the majority of my week has been sanding, cleaning and applying teak oil. Bill spent most of his week visiting Felo in town to make sure the bench work was being completed. Benches are moving along and we had quite the epiphany this week when he found out that while the Google Translate Spanish word for "bench" is "banco" (which also means "bank" so I am confused), Felo uses "muebles" (which means "furniture") for "bench". So, at least Felo quit staring at Bill with confusion as Bill was asking him to build a bank when all we wanted was a bench!
Since I don't want to bore you with my boat projects talk, I have decided to pay a little homage to Jeff Foxworthy by publishing the first "You might live on a sailboat in the Dominican Republic if....." blog. Here we go.... You might live on a sailboat in the DR if: 1. You spend all morning refinishing the teak oil only to have your boyfriend decide it is a good time to send old paint chips flying everywhere.... 2. You get all of the laundry into the washing machine only to have it die half way through the fill cycle.....but miraculously, the dryer that has never worked is suddenly fully functional.... 3. You go all the way into town for cash only to discover that the ATMs in town are out of cash...all 2 of them! 4. You can only find acetone in the beauty section of the grocery store and not anywhere in a hardware store... 5. Your rental car is a 2002 Ford Ranger... 6. Every destination is "just 20 minutes away" and anyone who you are waiting for will "be back in 30 minutes".... 7. Every Gringo you meet has never watched American football but roots for a rugby team name the Magpies.... 8. Every piece of scrap you take off the boat is claimed by a local before you get it to the dumpster.... 9. On the government organized "annual trash pick up day," you are picking up trash but the local officials are only posing for selfies and smoking cigars.... 10. The local fishing boats have to give their Mother Ship a tow (see picture below for full effect!).... 11. You can have the police officer hold your beer while you negotiate your traffic violation.... 12. The ants in the shower outnumber the amount of water droplets coming out of the showerhead.... And last but not least.... If you wake up every day to the most beautiful weather and look forward to a day full of wonder....You might live on a sailboat! I leave you with the hope that our new batteries that arrived today will be hooked up and running this week and that means....coffee and microwave warmed Poptarts at last!!! Hispaniola (the official name of the island which the DR and Haiti occupy) was the first site of a European settlement in the new world. Columbus first landed about 15km from Luperon and his fleet stayed in Luperon Bay which is where we have been since July. This week, we ventured over to La Isabela which is the archeological site for the town that Columbus founded and settled. At the site, there is a small museum and visitors can walk through the ruins. When we arrived, we were met by our guide who spoke no English so with our level of Spanish skills, we knew we were headed for an adventure. He pulled out his phone and as we went through the museum, he would type single words such as “hinges” or “weapons” to explain what we were seeing in the museum. Needless to say, hinges and weapons are easily identified without interpretation so we just smiled a lot and then gave him a tip for his time. The ruins were well preserved and we saw Columbus’ home’s foundation and a really cool cemetery. Following La Isabela, we headed over to a place we had heard about called Fricolandia. The pictures on the website looked interesting so we thought it would be worth a stop. Upon arrival, we realized that while the cruise ships may not be sailing, their tourist trap destinations are still available for folks with dinero in their pockets. We paid our “entrance fee” which included swimming by the cliffs and really loud Dominican music. I am pretty sure that no one else in the place paid the tourist fee but since there have been no gringos in sight since March, we figured we’d support the local economy. We ordered lunch which turned out to be reasonably priced and actually tasted good so we were pleasantly surprised. While eating, we watched many of the locals jump from platforms into the water. We noted that the majority of them were wearing life vests so we assumed the area must be deep or the currents strong. After changing into our swimsuits, we decided to take on the swimming adventure. We entered the water through the cave area instead of jumping off the platform so we could make sure we did not need life vests. As we stepped into the water in the cave, the water depth started at 1 inch and possibly made it to 12 inches as we walked into the swimming area. The swimming area made it to about 5 feet at best so we were not sure why the locals needed life vests, however, we did determine that the Dominican Republic had more than likely never won a medal at the Olympics in the sport of swimming!
That night, we stayed in an Airbnb called, “La Casa Del Pie Negro” which translates to “House of the Black Foot”. Never could get an answer to why the motel was named as such so that mystery shall just have to remain a mystery. Upon arrival, we discovered that our host was a Frenchman who only spoke French and Spanish and he, of course……owned an Italian restaurant! He quickly figured out that we spoke no French so Spanish it was! He took off rapidly explaining something about the water in our room. I am assuming our blank stares encouraged him to slow down and use a massive amount of gestures in order to tell us that the local fire department had used all of the water in the area to put out a fire earlier that day. We had running water but it was not potable so he kept gesturing drinking followed by a huge headshake ‘no’ followed by an expression of someone being very ill. Ah! So don’t drink the water….we got that message loud and clear! Perhaps the black water pouring out of the shower and sink were the reason the place was called the “House of the Black Foot”. We were the only guests at the motel and the restaurant that night so he sat with us at dinner and we were quite pleased to see how our understanding of Spanish improved as the night proceeded. He spoke more slowly than the locals and used actual Spanish instead of Dominican Spanish so we felt we did quite well. The motel had a huge infinity pool that overlooked the ocean and he explained that he had built the pool by himself and had used the rocks to build the walls around the motel. It took him 12 years to complete the pool! He had lived in the DR for over 20 years but the only thing we could understand when we asked, “why” was that “France was bad”. So, having been to Paris and treated poorly by the French in Paris, I had to agree with his statement and move on. When we returned to the boat, our friends asked us if we wanted to drive to Puerto Plata on Saturday to do some grocery shopping. One day of grocery shopping turned into two nights in Cabarete at our favorite Airbnb place. Living on permanent vacation is such a grind! Lisa and Erik had not been to Cabarete so we enjoyed showing them around and they fell in love with the area. We spent Saturday going on the cable car in Puerto Plata. The cable car goes up the second highest mountain in the DR (2600 feet above sea level) and they have a Christ the Redeemer statue on top of the mountain. Our guide explained that while the DR Christ the Redeemer may be smaller than Brazil’s, the DR statue is worth more because it was made out of bronze instead of rock. The guide was very adamant about this point so he was obviously tired of people insulting his statue over the years! We spent Sunday on the beach and ate way too much food at the restaurants. Nights were spent in the pool and we all went to bed fat and happy each night….and we had USA ESPN in the condo so we got to watch the Dawgs beat Auburn…..always a happy ending! My final observation for the week was on our way back to the boat this morning. In the DR, they generally have at least 3 or 4 people on one motorcycle. This morning, we passed a mother and her children all on one motorcycle. No helmets. But they were all wearing Covid masks. Thank goodness they won’t get Covid before they all get a head trauma! I hope you have a wonderful week and I’ll try to look like we are doing some work this week! |
AuthorSally Miller Archives
May 2024
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