At the airport. Sad, but coming home. Hopefully we turned off everything, closed all the hatches. The marina will haul out the boat on Monday. We won’t be back for a few months.

Was quite the adventure now the adventure in air travel continues. See you all on Monday.

Today we wrapped up the cleaning, organizing, and prepping process.  There is a pretty good hardware store across the street from the marina which I frequented often.  I wanted to see if we could get some of the replacement items locally so we did not have to ship them (towels, pillows, plate ware, etc…) so I took a cab into town to find some recommended stores and I was hugely unsuccessful after visiting 4 stores.  I did manage to inventory the items under the main seating area which took me awhile and started packing our suitcase – ugh what a sad time. I really wanted to stay through Christmas as it is warm and pretty here – but we have already missed a lot of work.

Matt finished cleaning up the bilges, the exterior of the boat and is satisfied with the state of everything.  We left some things outside knowing that we would put them away in the morning, but to our dismay the night brought about a lot of heavy rains.  We spent most of the night closing and re-opening the hatches trying to get some air in the boat. By the time we got up we had to dry off the interior of the boat and get the items left outside in area that would not promote mold.  We closed Sugar Shack up with a touch of gratitude for delivering us safely across the Atlantic Ocean.  Off we go to the airport and to the States.

Ron left early this morning, without a good bye. L I tried to catch him at the cab area around 6am but he was long gone.  Matt and I started working on the boat early to try to beat the heat.  He worked on pickling the water marker, cleaning out the exterior pockets, cabinets, and hatch storage areas while I worked on the galley, office, and interior of the boat.  The first thing I attacked was the food storage areas under the settee.  Matt and I don’t like having the food stored under the seats so I had to rearrange the cupboards on the port side to accommodate the new food storage area.  All the food had to be taken out, evaluated for edibility, checked for expiration, cleaned and moved.  Then the storage areas had to be scrubbed down as they were all dirty, grimy, and/or something. It took me hours to go through the food, galley, linens, Tupperware and other port side cabinets.  The office was next.  We disassembled the bed and cleared everything for a good wipe down. The drawers were re-arranged, the books were removed (hopefully we will replace them with kindles), the bookcases and shelves cleaned.  Now the office looks like an office and is super clean.  Then I moved on to the port head – this was a dreaded area as it was used by 2 men for 2 ½ months and never cleaned.  It stunk, really, really bad, everything was stained and overall it was determined to be the worst job on the boat.  It took me another couple of hours to get the head to a reasonable state of cleanliness.   There is still a smell, but that could be due to the head and use of sea water as opposed to fresh water – at least it is clean enough for me to use now J

Matt heard about a “jump up” tonight which we have always wanted to attend.  We arrived a bit too early as they were still setting up (it was around 830p), but we were able to get a first look everything and walk around before the crowds arrived.  They had a speaker that was over 12’ tall and 10’ wide – huge thumping noise with great local music.  There were dozens of vendors selling their food all over the place.  We sallied up to the bar to get a beverage (local’s pay 2 EC for a beer, but us gringos like us paid 5 EC).  We tried some pork kabob from a small vendor and it was amazing.  Matt told me to get a platter of mixed foods from one of the larger vendors and they offered rabbit, goat, horse meat and a mystery meat – no way, José!  I went to a different vendor and got chicken, macaroni and cheese and some other local flavor – not so bad, not nearly as good as the first kabob.