Endless Tedious Monotonous Toil

We piled in the car and headed for La Paz- a four hour drive from Escondido through some drop dead beautiful scenery.

There was much to do in La Paz but first up, was a mandatory stop at our favorite arrachera joint.  We filled up on seriously yummy "meat candy" ( grilled, marinated beef) folded into perfectly cooked homemade tortillas fresh of the grill, served with a platter of roasted spicy salsas, grilled hot peppers, pickled red onions and perfect guacamole. Mexican food is so delicious, it's insane.

We drove around looking for a hotel with a good deal- lots of things were shut, it's slow season right now and the whole city is pretty quiet. We found the best deal at a super-groovy hotel, called El Moro - it's old and funky and the rooms were huge and had kitchens and tons of sleeping spaces and the pool was great. It was also right in the malecon-the main drag in any Mexican waterfront town-and close to all the marinas.

Jon took off with the car on his treasure hunt for engine parts and the kids and I did schoolwork in the luxury of an air conditioned hotel room.

It was HOT HOT HOT on the boat last week and not much schoolwork was possible.  Pura Vida was a total disaster area.  Every conceivable surface was covered in engine parts and spares waiting to be used or stowed. Only the kids head was working, ours was in the process of being torn apart by Jon- a task Dante might have thought to add to one of his levels of inferno- and our fridge wasn't working. This meant we had no fresh food aboard and Jon had yet another headache.

We suffered through heat exhaustion and fixed and stowed as much as we could and with the help of a fellow cruiser( who happened to be a fridge expert and was, by Neptune's grace, anchored outside Escondido) we managed to get the fridge working again.

In La Paz, Jon was on a quest for hoses and clamps and fittings and pipes and tubes of various and impossible to find sizes. Finding the right bits was as crucial to our engine fix as a proper set of medical instruments is to a heart surgeon facing his first bypass.

The next day, it was my turn to forage. I set out with a massive mental list of everything we would need to feed and care for a family of four for the next three months. 

We would be facing very few resupply possibilities. There are pueblos between Escondido and Bahai Los Angeles but once we get up there, we must plan on pretty much total self-sufficient. I learned the last time out what works well for us and what does not-canned green beans are YUCKY-so I felt pretty confident this time around.

Once again, the Subaru was filled to the limit-this time with more marine supplies and dry food stores and boxes of milk and sunscreen and medical supplies and nice cheeses and pounds of flours for breads and tortillas and boxes of good butter for baking and whole frozen chickens-for that new solar oven!

One final fresh shop this coming Sunday at the farmer's market in Loreto will finish off my part of the reprovisioning duties.

And... I still need to get my hands on some injectable Lidocaine, in the event of emergency stitches while out of medical help range.

It is not true that a Mexican  pharmacy hands out drugs like M&M's on Halloween. They ( understandably) expect you to have a prescription for lots of things. We stopped by the hospital to see a doctor and get one but the line was so long, if you saw it, you would never again complain about an emergency room in LA. 

We decided not to get any life threatening cuts or stingray wounds in the next few months.

Back at El Moro, we enjoy showers and television and then it's back in the car and over the mountains and back to Pura Vida.

We load hundreds of bags onboard (again!) and much to our dismay, find the fridge is not working (again!). I do my best to keep our precious cheeses and chickens from being totally destroyed. It's 115 degrees inside the boat and Jon fixes and fusses with the magnetic brushes on the fridge motor and finally gets her going again.

Whew.

That night, Jon lays out and labels everything he will be fixing on the engine.

It's a daunting task he faces but like everything else about being a skipper, he's entirely on his own. No one is gonna fix your broke ass old engine but you.  He hasn't spoken much in the last few days and I know he's just going over and over what has to be done in his head. 

The next morning, we wake up early and Jon and I down some day old coffee over ice. It's 8am and already 100 degrees outside.

Jon disappears into the engine room-well, parts of him do- his legs and arms hang out of the door in various excruciating ashtanga poses as he wrestles with frozen bolts and ancient hoses.

I homeschool the kids and we decide to make our first meal in the solar oven.

I let the kids do it all, including reading the instructions for how to use it -this is our first time)

The thing is so simple you could let a five year old bake a cake unassisted. There is no fossil fuel used, so there is no danger of burns or fire. Kai fills a pot with lentlis and chicken and herbs and garlic and Hunter fills another with rice and chicken broth and raisins and ground cumin seeds.

They put the lids on, stick them in the oven, close the plastic lid covering it and put it directly in the sun on the foredeck. It was 10 am when they did it and we will check and see if dinner is ready around 4 pm.

So...that's where we are as of this moment.

If all goes as planned Jon will finish the engine tonight and it will start and we will celebrate with a hot meal I never had to cook and tomorrow morning we will shop at the Sunday market in Loreto and fill the water tanks at the fuel dock tomorrow night and be on our way at first light on Monday morning...

Insha'Allah!

El Moro

Home away from home

cooking with the sun!

It's 10 am and he did not fall overboard-that's sweat.