The grass is greener...on both sides!

Living on land for the last 2 months makes you realize how relatively easy it can be. Easy in terms of comfort, no need for Tod to step over me while he goes to bed. No need to carefully watch the weather, although we went through a tornado warning in Ohio. Access to bountiful stores, where you get to pick from 20 types of apples (meet the Berkeley Bowl, where they are offering 4 types of Fiji apples alone ). Fast internet to order/watch anything to your heart's desire. Doing laundry at your place, without having to drag it to a laundromat. Hop in your car, and just drive to great state parks, and fun playgrounds. No need to watch you electricity usage or water usage as carefully (but we still do to some extent; Tessa told me the other day" mama you are wasting water" when I let the shower run for a bit to get hot water!).

But comfort and ease of living is not all what we seek. We can also thrive on challenges that cruising in your sailboat provide. We love to have open  nature as our backyard, and exploring new places and cultures. We love the ease of making new friends, when we share the luxury of no set schedules.

And here is the joy of what we are doing at this time: we have access to both ways of living, nomadic and stationary. And both ways work well for us now. We get to spend time with our family and long time friends while stationary, while in a couple of months we will fill up on our wanderlust again. So yes, the grass is green, or greener, on both sides!

this is a great backyard to enjoy too!

happy hour with life entertainment at the cheeseboard. Jackets in the summer here!

Meet Betsy, a cousin of Bliss

The Bliss crew is back in Berkeley, and has been active on the $$$ spending front. In one week we purchased 3 modes of transportation, two of them we will sell in a couple of months for likely the same price we paid for: a Honda Civic for commuter car, a BOB jogging stroller for going around town, and.....drum, drum, drum.....a 24' Tioga RV, named Betsy.

Betsy will take us on new land adventures in the US and Canada during summer/fall, while her water cousin-once-removed Bliss will be our trusty companion in Mexico for the next couple of years in the winter.

Just some pictures for now. During the next couple of months we plan to take her on some local trips, until Tod's job is finished. In the meantime, Tessa is having a blast in the hot tub, at her morning play group, and trying out the piano. And us? Enjoying the house of our friends, making new plans, and filling up the cruising kitty.

 

Patient Doug letting Tessa play

Tod likes projects, and without a boat, he tackles some house projects

From desert to the city of green

Green, every shades of green, wherever you look. The next town over is appropriately called the City of Green.  A landscape so different from the desert of Baja. The weather is different too: plenty of rain, and humidity. The change of scenery is a welcome one, makes you appreciate the differences.

a good rainstorm makes for a fun pool

plenty of room to run around in oma an opa's back yard

We arrived in Ohio 2.5 weeks ago, and we are enjoying our stay with oma and opa. They are great sports and hosts, and oma plays with Tessa for hours with what seems an endless collection of toys. With their 50th wedding anniversary we had the whole family in town, and Tessa got to meet her adorable new cousin Cayden.

Tod and I are reading up on a new form of traveling: shall we get a motorhome  Class C or a travel trailer for our road trip in the US? We have been looking at a few here to get a feel, and so far I don’t feel the same love I feel for boats. It’s so much more fun to look at sail boats, and I’m not getting that feel/vibe when we are looking at “land yachts”.  Ah well, we will keep looking during the next few months while we be working / living in Berkeley, and hope that the amazing places we plan to visit combined with no need for rough overniters on the ocean or sea will make up for the lack in vibe I feel for the mode of transportation.  

naked Bliss

Is this our beloved Bliss? She looks so naked (or naky, naky, as Tessa started to say when she was younger).

It's hard to believe, but when you take all your lifelines and netting off, you take the dodger and bimini down, cover all your winches and plastics with aluminium foil, then this is the end result. Hard to imagine this is how she came in this world as well, and that 30+ yrs ago, her first owners bought her like this (OK, I admit in a bit better shape than this).

Our haul out was at 130 sh today, and we were excited and anxious to see the truck driver coming with this large hydraulic trailer. The haul-out team obviously know what they are doing, as they have done it for years, and do this procedure for hundreds of boats each year. After they hauled Bliss out of the water, she went for a 1/2 mile ride on the road to the work yard, where Tod is doing the final touches for dry and heat preparations (I have read about recorded thermometers of 150 degrees F inside boats during peak summer). You gotta think carefully what you store down below in that kind of heat!

We are now spending our 2 last nites in Mexico in a hotel. Tessa is slightly confused by this. "When are we going back to Bliss", she asks? Bliss is the only home she knows. But she tells everyone who is willing to listen that Bliss is out of the water, and that she is going to see oma and opa. Hopefully the taxi driver will come with a large enough car on Wednesday morning to fit all our luggage: 2 large duffel bags close to 50 pounds each , 2 carry ons and 2 personal items. Oh yes, car seat as well. The Bliss crew travels not so light.....

Thanks for following us on our first cruising season, and we are hoping to see many of you during our land travels in the US!

Bliss going towards the Golden Gate at the start of our journey,
almost 8 months ago (courtesy picture of Mika)