Says Bonnie, “My Iggie won’t bite.”
But I’m still afraid that he might–
She says he’s in heat.
(Will he nip my feet,
Because my red toenails excite?)
Iggie is a 4-1/2 foot long iguana. He’s currently in heat and attracted to women of any species.
It started with the cookies. When Barry’s Mom asked if we’d like a batch of oatmeal scotchies for the road, we responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” Oatmeal scotchies are Barry’s favorite, and we also looked forward to sharing them with my sister, Julie, in Eugene, Oregon.
Sharon also gave me a treat: A big bag of dried Michigan cherries.
A couple of days later, we were packing the van after a visit with Tom and Gudrun in Yelm, Washington. Barry asked if they had a little ice for our cooler. Instead, Tom gave us three frozen bricks of homemade pesto. This was in addition to the bottles of homemade wine he’d just given us.
And so we traveled south to Eugene, carrying cookies and cherries and wine and pesto.
The cherries were a big hit — we shared them with Julie in our morning oatmeal. The cookies were perfect after a long day of skiing with Daisy. And when we went to Ellen and Gary’s house, we opened a bottle of Tom’s wine.
“We have some homemade pesto, too,” I told Ellen. She whipped out rice crackers, put the pesto and some swiss cheese on them, and zapped them in the microwave. Because of the merging of Italian pesto and Asian crackers, she named them “Marco Polos.”
That evening, Ellen and Gary also gave us a huge 2-horned parsnip from their garden. I thought I would make a pressure cooker stew in a few days.
A couple of days later, they invited us to a potluck dinner with their friends Barbara and Joe. We took along some more of Tom’s pesto, and when Barbara found out we were traveling, she gave us two more gifts: Homemade applesauce and elderberry jam. It was a joyous coincidence, because we’d once lived with a dear friend, also named Barbara. She’s gone now, but she made the best applesauce and elderberry jam in the world.
We were planning to visit that Barbara’s son Michael in southern California, and we couldn’t wait to share the elderberry jam with him.
And so each precious gift we receive travels down the road with us a little ways, and then we stop and share it. Then we receive another gift, which makes its way to the next stop. And the cycle continues.
We continued to the Bay area, where we visited Jeannie and Cliff and Jerry. We shared more wine and cherries, and they gave us oranges for the road.
We finally made it Michael and Doeri and Eliza’s house, with our offerings of elderberry jam and homemade wine and pesto. Remember the parsnip? It got roasted instead of stewed!
And in the middle of a conversation with Michael about a completely unrelated topic, he stopped me and said, “When you leave, don’t forget to take your jam!”
“What jam?”
When we left, he gave us many jars of his own elderberry jelly, peach jam, and burnt kumquat marmalade to enjoy and share. He’d made them for Christmas, but a kitchen remodel interfered, and they never made it into the mail. We were delighted to receive our Christmas presents in person in April.
Now we’re in San Diego with Bonnie and Chuck, eating Michael’s elderberry jelly on sourdough bread, along with fresh-picked oranges and grapefruit.
The cookies and pesto and parsnip are just fond memories now. The cherries are almost gone, too. But we still have plenty of homemade wine and jam to share, along with something sweet and crunchy to replace the cookies — caramel corn from Barry’s Aunt Jo.
When we left home, we weren’t planning to gather food and share it all the way down the west coast. It just happens that way. As Gordon Bok sings, “Everybody puts their cookin’ hat on when you’re leavin’ in the morning.”
We’re leaving Bonnie and Chuck’s in the morning. The van seems a little overloaded, and I think we’re carrying more food than when we left. That just means we’ve been falling down on the job — we need to share it!
The room filled with much merry sound,
Three sisters who mooned as they clowned,
The game was revamped,
We laughed and we stamped,
As ping-pong was played in the round.
We discovered a fun way to play ping-pong at Highlands pub in Eugene. Four people play round-robin, each one hitting the ball once and then rushing around the table to the other side. The results were a few collisions and some hilarious video footage. Do not try this in a pub with dartboards!
We’ve been out almost one week, and finally, we’re catching our breath. You can’t have fun all the time; sometimes you have to stop and write about it!
We were having such a nice time at Barry’s parents’ house, with spring flowers and daily rainbows and bald eagles overhead, home cooking and Tumblebugs and weenie roasts, we almost forgot to leave. But on Monday, March 24th, we tore ourselves away with a few tears on both sides and headed south.
Not too far, though — we only drove 60 miles. In Seattle, Jim and Barbara treated us to a farewell dinner at a breathtakingly beautiful restaurant with a view of Elliott Bay and downtown. The Pacific Northwest is a hard place to leave, filled with natural beauty and good friends. But there are grand adventures beckoning, and we talked about them over stuffed scallops and grilled mahi-mahi:
1 – March-April: The drive from Seattle to North Carolina in the Squid Wagon. Squidley is distinctive, a big blue Ford van with a tiny incongruous wooden dinghy on top. We’ll see friends from Seattle to San Diego, then turn east, camping and visiting more friends in Oklahoma and the Carolinas.
2 – April-July: Living and working aboard our Freedom 33, Flutterby, in a boatyard in Beaufort, North Carolina. The boat’s currently hauled out, but we can stay aboard while we work on it.
3 – July-???: Sailing from Hawaii to Australia aboard Complexity with Jim and Barbara and Abby. We have been dreaming about this trip since 2005, when we sailed with them to Alaska. This year, we all think it’s going to be a reality!
We made another important stop in Seattle, saying farewell to Mike and Nita aboard Odessa and buying Odessa’s original stove and oven for Flutterby. They had a new one, but it took a little prodding from well-meaning friends (us) to get it installed, since Nita was attached to the old one. She told me that knowing she could read about her trusty old stove on the Foodie Gazette website was a factor in letting it go.
Our second stop was Yelm, Washington, home of Tom and Gudrun. We’ve stopped at their 100-year-old house several times to share conversation and design silly labels for their homemade wine. We helped with Badda Bing and Goodie Two Shoes labels, and this time we did OPG: Other People’s Grapes. I love doing projects with friends, especially these two!
When we first pulled up to their house, they came out for a look at the Squid Wagon and our gear. Tom studied it a bit and then asked, “Is this everything you own? How much did you leave in storage?” After our answer (“not much”), he started to tell us about a time when all his belongings fit into the back seat of a drive-away car. I don’t think he intended the story to take all evening, but it did, like this:
“How did you end up in New Mexico?”
Then came the whole story of the girl and the overloaded convertible with the gigantic roof rack and the canoe, his friend who towed him to Virginia Beach, where he learned to hang doors and replaced the sportcar with a Ford Falcon. And then the story went to Wyoming.
“But what happened to the girl?”
And then the whole story of Wyoming, and how he got word that it was time to move on from the sheriff, and he packed up the Bellair, the car that saved his life —
“But what happened to the Ford Falcon?”
And then the story of how he and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog rolled the Ford on a patch of ice, and it came out right-side up with no injuries, but the windshield got shattered, so it was a mighty cold drive home that night.
“So how did the Bellair save your life?”
Well, that had to do with the fact that he didn’t have a girlfriend, so he stopped to see a promising prospect in Colorado. Some miners stopped by her house, and evidently, they didn’t want competition for the only girls in town. Tom escaped their beating by jumping out of the window of the house, then circled back on foot to his Bellair. The miners chased him down the highway, shooting at him — but they couldn’t catch the Bellair, so it saved his life.
“But what happened to the Bellair?”
He came out of a cafe and found someone trying to steal it. He thwarted that one, but then his stereo was stolen. So he sold the Bellair and drove from the Southwest to Connecticut without stopping for sleep. In the driveaway car, a taxicab, all his remaining belongings fit in the back seat. Which brought us back to the genesis of the story: Is this everything you own?
We left Tom and Gudrun’s house laden with gifts of wine and pesto and a grinder, and after a stop at Cabela’s (which I teasingly called “REI with guns”), we continued south. Somewhere before the Oregon border, I woke Barry from his nap, exclaiming “Holy cow! It’s snowing!” Five days later, as I write this, a rare spring snow is falling again here in Eugene, followed by blue skies and cold sunshine.
Our stay in Eugene has lasted longer than expected, but there’s so much to do with Julie and Ed and Daisy and Ellen and Gary! We’ve played pool and ping-pong, soaked in hot tubs, taken walks, visited some amazing workplaces, made dinner, had dinner made for us, ripped vinyl records to digital files, repacked the van, shopped at REI, and yesterday, we had a ski adventure with Daisy, Meps’ sister.
Daisy has discovered a special spot which has not been covered by snow in 26 years. It’s a lava flow, the kind of place that’s impossible to visit on foot or by vehicle. But covered with a thick blanket of snow, it’s possible to ski or snowshoe into this magical place and enjoy vistas and immense trees that have never seen humans.
Our friends Ellen and Gary loaned us skis, and Daisy led us into the silent white wilderness. She’s a strong skiier, but she got a tough workout, breaking trail for us. All was fine until I fell, then I discovered how hard it was to get back up!
We went up and up, and until we turned around and went down and down, I didn’t realize that it was easier going up. It had been so long since I’d skiied, I fell over and over, spending much of the day on my back like a fleece-covered cockroach. Happily, I didn’t fall down on every hill, and got to do my share of “Wheeeeeeee!” that wasn’t always followed with “Damn!”
We have one or two more adventures planned here in Eugene, then tomorrow morning we’ll hope for clear weather over the passes to the south. Next stop, San Francisco (I think).
Squid are creatures that live in the deep,
Not a sound as they swim and they creep.
I was shocked to the core,
When I heard my squid roar,
‘Twas a miracle, wrought by my Peep.
Barry, who I sometimes call “Peep,” wrote about this event in his usual understated fashion in his recent blog entry.
Here’s a fabulous response from our friend Pat, who lives in NC:
A wagon that roars and squirts ink
(Not oil, of that let’s not think)
will ferry you back to your boat
and shlep all the stuff it will will float.
Please stop by so we can see you and wink!
When the big female candidate cried,
People said, “The ex-president’s bride
Is not really tough,
And campaigning is rough.”
But it brought voters o’er to her side.
If only we’d gone out of town,
And cut a fresh Christmas tree down.
This grocery store tree,
Once looked fine to me.
But now, tell me, why is it brown?
It’s been raining since we got home to Seattle. The trees in our backyard are bare, and the world is solid gray, with a hint of evergreen. It’s a little gloomy, but it makes me think happily of Christmas.
What a change from the Carolinas, where we left behind a landscape of bright blue water and sky, accented with green and warm tan.
At Bock Marine, we left a bright spot of Christmas red on the landscape, in the form of Flutterby, on the hard for the winter. She’s right off the waterway, so there’s a fabulous view from the deck, 10 feet up. I had to stop and watch every time a giant phosphate barge went by, which was several times a day — they’re so wide, they seem to stretch from one bank to the other.
The boatyard is fascinating, full of boats and equipment to be curious about. Kenny Bock owns the yard; his father owned it before him and built workboats there. Kenny’s soft-spoken, but he knows boats, and everyone listens when he talks. There are probably a hundred boats in the yard, some for sale, some in storage for the winter, and some just out for a quick bottom-paint job.
The most interesting boats are the projects, some of them active, others abandoned.
Near the entrance, where visitors arrive by car, there’s a field full of these abandoned sentinels, silent boats marching across the landscape. Folks in the yard call it the “field of broken dreams.”
Closer to Flutterby, there are many active projects, and we were lucky to meet one of the owners right after our haulout.
Dan is working on a steel Roberts Offshore 44 that he’s been building for 11 years. Funny Farm is rigged and about ready to go in the water. From the outside, she looks complete, with a charming lamp shining in the pilothouse. But the interior is barely begun, just a single berth and a counter with a hotplate and lots of open space.
Dan welcomed us to the yard and gave us a ride to the nearby convenience store and restaurant in his big red tool truck. We sat in the yard lounge eating steak and cheese sandwiches and sharing stories. I found myself selfishly hoping that he wouldn’t be launching his boat too soon — he’s a great neighbor.
On Saturday, we finished most of our layup chores, and I began doing my prairie dog imitation, popping my head out the hatch every five minutes. I was eagerly waiting for my brother, who was driving down from Raleigh to spend the day with us and take us back to the Raleigh airport.
When he was an hour late, I rolled my eyes and assumed he was lost. But after two hours, I started to get worried. I called his home, but there was no answer. Had he had an accident or a breakdown? Our cell phone seemed to be working, but he didn’t call.
Finally, three hours after he was to arrive, he called to say he hadn’t left. He didn’t sound like he would be able to come.
What to do? We were in the middle of nowhere in a boatyard with no car, spotty phone service, and no internet. And two tickets from Raleigh to Seattle.
Luck was with us, in the form of Dan, who just happened to be driving back to Raleigh that evening in his big red truck. It was a miserable rainy night, but the three of us had lots more stories to share. The four-hour drive went quickly, including a stop for dinner in Goldsboro at a well-known barbecue joint called Wilber’s. I indulged my craving for pork barbecue, turnip greens, and that uniquely Southern delicacy, sweet tea (pronounced swate-tay).
When we reached Raleigh, I was befuddled by the fact that my brother was still out of pocket. Without looking at the time (it was past 9 pm), I called an old friend, Pat. He left his warm, cozy home and drove across town to rescue us from a MacDonald’s, where Dan had been keeping us company and swapping more stories.
This is not the most memorable ride we’ve gotten from Pat — many years ago, when we returned from our wedding, Pat met us at the gate, apologizing and saying that he’d had to bring our car instead of his own. When we reached the parking garage, we discovered why — he’d decorated it with streamers and balloons and crepe paper! Luckily, he didn’t tie any tin cans to the bumper.
With the help of Pat and his wife, Belinda, Barry and I were soon settled in a room at the Day’s Inn with eight pillows, enough for a great pillow fight. We had a lot of catching up to do with Pat, and when we finally crashed, we were almost on Pacific time.
I never did catch up with my missing brother, but we did make it to the plane on time.
And now, we’re home! Just in time for Christmas! I can hardly believe it — last year this time, we were heading off to Portugal. Who knows what next year will bring?
After the night of big guns, our trip into Beaufort was uneventful. The most exciting thing that happened was Margaret’s discovery that the holding tank vents into the cockpit, of all places. She was cruising along, enjoying the warm sunshine at the helm, when Barry went below to use the head. He was merrily flushing away when she started screaming, “Stop! Stop!” at the top of her lungs. ‘Nuff said.
We anchored in the creek off Beaufort, unintentionally placing ourselves as close to the public dinghy dock as possible. Initially, we stayed on the boat through a the first current change, to make sure we’d be in the correct position when every boat in the crowded anchorage did a 180-degree pirouette.
In the morning, we added air to our inflatable kayaks and paddled the short distance to the dock, where we had to jockey for space with a half-dozen rowing dinghies, inflatables, and hard kayaks. It’s frustrating to find that everyone else has used a short 1-foot line to tie up, crowding around the dock like a bunch of greedy piggies at the trough — makes it especially hard to pull a kayak alongside and get out! If you are a boater, and you are reading this, remember to be a good citizen and put a nice long painter on your dinghy.
Other than a crowded dinghy dock, Beaufort was fabulous. We walked the streets, with houses from the 18th and 19th centuries, hung out at the library and the coffee shop, and browsed a few little gift shops. We also visited the Old Burying Grounds at dusk, where tombstones reflect the town’s history, and one sad grave is marked “Little Girl Buried in a Rum Cask.”
We rented a car for a day and checked out the three boatyards we were considering: Bock Marine, Core Creek Marine, and Russell’s. All three have pluses and minuses. Russell’s is tiny, but located within walking distance of many stores and restaurants in Morehead City. They lost points for their lack of liveaboard amenities, having only a dingy bathroom with shower and no lounge, and the fact that they are very expensive. Core Creek has great bathrooms, but the atmosphere is industrial, like living in a gravel lot. Their fee structure is complex, but reasonable.
Bock Marine is our choice for the refit, a pretty but hard-working place surrounded by woods. There may be mosquitoes, but we’re willing to chance it. There are lots of interesting boats in storage, for sale, and being worked on, some of them by liveaboards like us. We enjoyed walking around, looking at boats, and chatting with a couple working on a large sloop. Val and Gigi are French-Canadians who cruised the South Pacific for 18 years and are now getting their next boat ready.
There’s a courtesy car, a lounge area, and a couple of bathrooms with showers. What a dream, after our time in Seabrook boatyard in New Orleans, where the only “amenity” was a single ripe port-a-potty, known as the Pot o’ Gold.
Sometimes, I think this blog has too much about bathrooms and holding tanks and not enough about other cruising.
We’re pulling up the anchor and going up to our haulout today. Then it’s back to Seattle for the holidays, after a much-anticipated visit with Margaret’s big brother, Stevie. I’ll write more then and do my best to keep the bathroom humor to a minimum!
We slowed and we stopped: We were stuck.
But then came a bit of good luck.
With some help from me,
The tide set us free,
And now we’re in water, not muck.
What are the three kinds of sailors? Those who have gone aground, those who will go aground, and those who lie about it.