Happy Holidays to all!

To all of you who follow our adventures we want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2009. Your support and love make that trip even more memorable and we owe it to you all.
For the holidays we decided to go back home in Canada where Christmas actually looks like it! For the past month we’ve seen Christmas decorations along the East Coast but for us, who are born in the snow, seeing a Christmas tree just beside a palm tree just doesn’t sound right! Here, since our arrival the temperature has averaged -15°C (5°F) and as I write these lines the snow falls hard and we expect about 20 cm. We will definitively have a white Christmas this year. However, as soon as the holidays are over, we will jump in a plane and fly back to Florida right away. That will be enough snow and cold for this year! We may have been born in the snow but that doesn’t mean we have to endure it forever, no? We haven’t left our jobs, sold our house and everything in it to suffer the snow more than three weeks per year trust me. Looking through the window I think I start missing the dolphins, manatees and pelicans that populate the Waterline Marina where Chocobo is in Florida. Since our arrival, the generosity from everyone has been just overwhelming. As soon as we landed we had Danielle’s father Richard that pick us up at the airport then Danielle’s mother Claudette who lent us her car and cell phone right after we landed! More spoiled than that and you die. The two days we spent in Ottawa were awesome as we met many of our friends for breakfasts, lunches and dinners with us. (We don't think we will eat in a restaurant for at least a month after that though!)

Our resolutions for 2009 are pretty simple; we promise you that we will have fun, tons of fun, and that we will enjoy life plenty on our road in the Caribbean and Central America. We will try, as hard as we can, to share our adventures with you and hope you will dream as much as we do.

We’ll return to the boat at the beginning of January at which point we will resupply our provisions and complete the installation of some new pieces of equipment. Before our departure I managed to complete 31 action items out of 46 that are on my list while Danielle worked all this time cleaning the boat and ordering parts.

There are still a few non-critical items I’d like to do before we leave to take advantage of the availability of goods we benefit in the USA. We plan to spend a few days in Miami, cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas and then heading south to the Caribbean. Once out of the USA it will be much more difficult to get parts and food prices will increase. If you see pictures of Chocobo in the Bahamas and notice that its sinks a bit more than usual just remember that wine is very heavy and quite cheap in Florida.

Our sympathy from Florida

In support to our friends and family up in Canada who are buried under the snow we want everyone to know that we sympathize with you guys and that we, also, are under the tyranny of the shovel even here in Melbourne, Florida. Today it was 28°C and we took off from our boat chores but just to end up working hard at the beach as this picture clearly shows. We understand you folks!

As I mentioned it in our last post, here’s a picture of the local Wal-Mart that you can now use for a screen background ;-)

Here in Melbourne we spend most of our time working on the boat but yet we meet interesting people. The sailing community is relatively small and you never know who you meet. For instance, yesterday a boat arrived at the marina and we help them to dock, well they were Richard and Ann on their trimaran from the same Marina we were in Sackets Harbor three years ago. At the beach today, Danielle went and gave the pale and shovel that you see on the first picture to a couple with their son walking on the beach (we bought that shovel and pale just for the picture). These folks just happened to be also Canadian sailors and mooring at the same marina than us! This type of situation happened a few times so far in this trip. By the way, there’s tons of Canadian down here and on the east coast.

In Melbourne FL for a while.

Since we filled up ourselves with turkey, mashed potatoes and a table full of desserts in St-Marys, we kept moving on the ICW for a few days and we are now in Melbourne, Florida where we plan to stay at a local marina until January. The plan is to take the next week and half and complete all the work on the boat that we have left and buy everything we need once and for all. Then, on Dec 15th, we will fly to Montreal to spend Christmas with the family and to come back in Florida on Jan 7th, 2009. Unfortunately, the place here is not really scenic and it will be hard to get nice pictures while we are here. Although, who never dreamt to have a picture of Wal-Mart as a screen wallpaper? And it may not be a tourist place but there are many things that will happen and we’ll keep you posted.