JANUARY 11 - 16 ONE MORE WEEK IN NO NAME HARBOR

Various scenes from January in Key Biscayne

January 11 Time for puttering, reflection and mini-exploring: that’s what you expect to have time for as a retired and cruising couple, right?

Discoveries:

Miami cyclists, hundreds of them, are using the Rickenbacker Bridge to Key Biscayne on Saturday (the east-bound side of the bridge is closed to traffic) and they are stopping for water, OJ or Gatorade at the outdoor breakfast place we are at.

There are still lots of paths to explore with my bike; on one trip I was invited to join a “Biking and History of Key Biscayne” group (this one was a corporate group) as they peddled through the State Park.

The Park has prison vans and high school students in buses that come to help keep the place clean. (They seem to keep these groups on opposite sides of the park!)

We are enjoying the Cuban food -- this week it was the small round beef snack pastries -- and the Cuban coffee.

Dolphins still come through every once in a while and when one catches a fish it seems to come to the surface to show it off.

It’s fun to walk to the beach, buy an ice-cream cone (we have no freezer on the boat), and make a phone call home.

When you buy solar panels the sun stops shining! Before Monday, when we went to Miami to buy solar panels from a low-cost warehouse there, we had constant sunshine. Since then, it’s been cloudy half or more of the day.

You can live pretty well without power on the boat. Without the engine we have no batteries and we have to keep what is left in the batteries for the fridge. The solar panels will keep them charged enough to run the fridge. So we have used a crank-power radio, an oil lamp and flashlights, our Sunshower to heat water for showers, and our propane stove to heat water for dishes, etc. The Park provides a washer and dryer and restrooms. While we’re at the restroom pavillion we plug in our phones and laptop there to keep them charged.

We’re motivated to be able to read and understand some Spanish. We bought a Spanish/English dictionary in Miami. We’re asking lots of questions.

Jan. 14 This is the day the mechanics brought our parts back and re-installed them. Barry and Susan came back from other parts of Biscayne Bay and helped us to move the boat to the seawall. However, there is still one part that hasn’t yet been rebuilt (Ken was mad!) and in the end it is taking until the 16th to get the engine completely back to working order and with several parts new or rebuilt.

Plans for the future are to probably catch up with Barry and Susan and also with Addison and Pat in Marathon (in the Florida Keys). Some advice we have gotten is to wait for the “winter” weather, long periods of northerlies, to end before heading for the Bahamas. We have never been to the Keys west of Marathon, including Key West, so that would be an interesting destination.

PS Justin got back to Louisiana at Fort Polk this week, 13 months spent in Baghdad and almost 5 years spent in the Army. Thanks, Justin, for doing your part in our country’s defense. For the future there are plans to ski in New England, then ski in Argentina in their winter (June & July), then start grad school in public lands management.