Day 60, Year 6 A Little Shopping, A Little Boat Work
Date: Thursday, December 23, 2010
Weather: Back to Beautiful Weather, but Cool
Location: Simon’s Town, Western Cape, South Africa
This was a day of pink jobs and blue jobs. Irene of Moose took Carla of Odulphus, Karen and CJ of Adriatica, and myself to the Sun Valley Mall to do a little Christmas shopping. That was the pink job. Mark stayed on Windbird and rewired our hot water heater and installed the new alternator. So now we can now have hot showers aboard, and we do need hot showers here as room temperature water feels freezing in this climate. The installation of the new Balmar alternator went well, so he is much relieved. He also rewired the reverse cycle heating-air conditioning unit that we can only use when plugged into a marina. We haven’t used it since Boston and Mark just wanted to see if things are still working. They are, so if it gets really chilly at night we can run the heater while we are here. So it was a full day of blue jobs for Mark.
Tonight at 7 pm we are going to a braai at the Yacht Club. You have just had your shortest day of the year, but we just had our longest. It is light way into the evening, so we will go to the braai and meet some of the other yachties here. That should be fun, but I must say that I am not much in the spirit of Christmas. It is so hard to be away from family at this time of year. Tomorrow I’ll bake pies, cut onions and celery for making stuffing, and we’ll attempt a cranberry salad from cranberries in a can as there are no fresh ones here. I ordered a fruit flan (tart) from the French bakery in town for Christmas morning as that has become a bit of a tradition for us. And then on Christmas afternoon we will join with the other yachties for our Yankee Exchange, a shared dinner, and singing.
We have gotten some wonderful Christmas messages from many of our cruising friends, friends back home, and family. I’m hoping to have time tomorrow to do some writing in return. Maybe that will get me into the Christmas spirit.
