|
Home Port Our Logs The Crew Calendar Favorite Links The Boat Photo Album Route and Charts Miscellaneous Stuff |
Diane's DiaryFebruary 4 Wednesday Jacques from Dream Catcher stopped by at 8:30am as I had exchanged some money for him. At 9:30am, Janice and I went to the mall via dinghy. She bought me a batido drink for driving her, which was very nice but not necessary. I enjoy having company when I go. Anyway, we usually have a batido drink every time we go to the mall - fresh fruit in a blender with sugar and crushed ice. It's superb! I like strawberry the best. The drink only cost around .67 and strawberry is the most expensive. You can get other flavors like banana for about .30! I hate to think of what that would cost in the US! It's a really refreshing drink and so much better than soda. Anyway, we also stopped so I could bring the laundry in. That evening, we went with Janice and Weedie back to Plaza Mayor to see Master and Commander. Larry really liked the movie but I didn't care for it too much. I enjoyed getting out to the movies though. Afterwards, we all went to dinner in the Sports bar in the mall. It was a nice enjoyable evening out and something we don't do very often. It's nice to get off the boat though. Larry is content with just staying on the boat every night but I enjoy getting off the boat sometimes. Sometimes I just miss the space of having a big house so I could go into a different room from Larry if I want to watch something different on TV or just read. We don't exactly have much privacy or space on the boat. February 5 Thursday I made a big pot of chili after breakfast. The marina passed another letter out this morning regarding marina fees that wasn't what we negotiated so the rest of the committee and I spoke about it and we will go speak with the marina at 2pm today. Midnight Stroller got us some wonderful fresh shrimp today- $3 for a kilo so that's $1.50USD per pound! Can't remember when I last got that cheap price for shrimp in the US! They were super fresh too! We went to dinner and a movie in the marina bar. They had the movie "Last Samurai" which is so new it's still playing in the movies here. We enjoyed the movie but at over 3 hours thought it was to long. All of these DVD's are bootleg copies that can be had for less than the price of 2 people going to the movies! We don't have a DVD player but may just buy one, as it's so cheap to get DVD's here - less than $2USD per DVD. The trick apparently is you need a DVD player that plays all regions where the US only sells region 1. This means the copies won't run on a DVD player bought in the US. We may buy one as the DVD players are so cheap and there are loads of people that have DVD's they want to trade. Plus, DVD's are much smaller to keep on the boat than VCR tapes. The VCR tapes go bad after a while in this extreme humidity. We'll have to see when we come back from the US. February 6 Friday Well, I did a lot of cleaning today. I hand-washed some clothes. I had previously cleaned all the canvas jerry can and gas covers so I put all the covers back on. I cleaned all the Lexan windows. Boys, the dirt that came off of them was amazing! Orient Canvas stopped by to give us the prices we asked for- they have gone up in price quite a lot from last year. They are the only canvas dealers here so naturally they can name their own price. Their prices are cheap compared to US prices but are high for VE. At night we watched a movie Elias rented for us called the Basic and Lethal (at least that's what I think the US title is) with John Travolta, which we both enjoyed. February 7 Saturday We went to the flea market at the mini-mart this morning. Larry bought a new Alpenglow light fixture for half the price it's sold for in the US. I did a bunch of emails this morning. Larry keeps correspondence with a few friends but I mostly do all the emails to everyone else. In the PM, I went to Plaza Mayor with Andrea. She wanted to buy a dress for her son's wedding so I helped her. February 8 Sunday I spent a very relaxing, quiet day but Larry continued working on the boat as always. I keep telling him to take a few days off but he never does. I made bacon and eggs for breakfast - our normal weekend meal as I have more time to prepare it since Elias isn't here. I made a marinated steak dip. I also updated my logs. I helped Larry with holding a screwdriver for him while he was in an outside locker. I tried to take a little nap in the PM but couldn't sleep since Larry was making so much noise banging around outside. February 9 Monday The official exchange rate went up from 1600 to 1920 which was not good for us as we pay our marina bill and airline tickets at the official rate and than exchange our USD on the black market. Since we hadn't paid our marina bill yet we effectively had to pay an additional 20%. However, since the USD has increased in price, we will be paying only slightly higher than what we paid last year. Oh, well, I guess I should have already paid our bill but I was waiting until the marina straightened out the letter concerning the fees. Plus, I just wanted to pay everything when we came back from Caracas next week when we found out how Larry makes out with the eye surgery. I helped Larry move everything out of the aft cabin so Elias could varnish it while we are in Caracas. Now we have boat stuff everywhere! What a mess! It took us almost a whole day to shift everything around. We are leaving for Caracas tomorrow. February 10 Tuesday We took the 7am bus to Caracas so we were up at 5am and left the boat at 6am. We arrived in Caracas at 12:30 and took a taxi to TGIF, the American restaurant chain from the US, which wasn't very far from the bus station. It was nice to have a good old American hamburger again! After lunch, we took a taxi to the US Embassy as my passport was expiring in August and had to be renewed. Larry couldn't enter the Embassy as we had our bags with us and he had brought a scissor with him to trim his beard. Apparently that's not allowed inside! They wouldn't hold the scissor for him nor allow him to throw it in the garbage - not that he wanted to throw this scissor out, as he probably can't replace it here in VE. So, he waited outside while I went in. I paid the fee to renew my passport in B's so actually only paid $36USD to renew it; if I was in the US, I would have paid $55 so it was actually cheaper for me to do it here! The Embassy staff said it would take 2-3 weeks to get my passport back. Under new security regulations post-9/11, all passport renewals must be done in Washington and can no longer be renewed by Embassies. I paid $5USD to get it sent back via courier to PLC so we don't have to come back to PLC to get it. The only problem right now is the Embassy cancelled my current passport since you can't have two current passports and I am not coming back to the Embassy to get my new passport. So, what does that mean to have a cancelled passport? Well, I can't leave the country, enter the US or go anywhere within VE which requires a passport (so that means no air service). So, that means we can't go to Merida via plane- we can go via the 18-hour bus ride but I'm not about to take an 18-hour bus ride. I get bus sick and am barely able to make it the 5 hours into Caracas by bus. We got to the hotel at 4:30pm and our room wasn't ready yet. I was really tired and just wanted to sit and relax for a while so I was annoyed the room wasn't ready at this hour. So, we called Guilio and he will come to the hotel around 6pm for a quick visit. After we saw Giulio, we were both so tired we just ate the buffet dinner in the hotel. For $20 for the two of us it was very pricey but the food was surprisingly very good. We crashed out early at night. Oh, we have TV but no stations in English. Usually most hotels, especially 4 star hotels, have at least one station in English but this one doesn't. February 11 Wednesday We left the hotel at 8am to go to Centro Medico. Larry saw the eye doctor and had good news and bad news. The good news is that they are not going to operate. The bad news is he has to live with the double vision in his one eye or use glasses again. He definitely does not want to use glasses again as the whole reason for him getting the surgery was not to wear glasses again. He has a .05% astigamtion in the one eye, the one that has the double vision. Eric had said it was surgically induced and probably was. He was not too upset that they couldn't do anything for him although I don't know if I would have been so calm about it. He said he would still have the surgery again if he had to do it all over. While we were in the clinic we decided to go to an Urologist here. Larry has been having some problems for the past several years. We have heard the doctors in Caracas are much better than PLC. He went for the PSA test in the lab today and they will have the results tomorrow. After we finished with the Clinic, we went to Sambil mall to walk around. We had lunch at Chili's- another American restaurant chain. For less than $20 we had 2 burgers, fries and coke. That would be over double the price in the US for the same exact meal. We got back to the hotel around 4:30pm. We found out the hotel does have English movie channels - they were just not working in our room. So, they switched TVs for us- they wound up bringing 2 other TV's before they found one that worked correctly. Anyway, we had a drink and just relaxed for a while. Giulio, Luca and Giancarla arrived around 8:30pm and we went to a local restaurant in the mall to get pizza. It was very nice seeing them all again. They are leaving Friday for the US and will return 2/24. On 2/28, Giancarla is leaving VE to spend her sabbatical in Italy with her family. So, we wanted to see her before she left. We really enjoyed seeing them again and wish we could have spent more time with them but we understood they were very busy with her getting ready to leave. February 12 Thursday We slept until 8:30 as we were out late last night. We took showers and then went into the mall for breakfast so we didn't get a fast start to the day. We walked around the mall and than headed back to the room. We walked to another mall, which had another TGIF restaurant in it. We shopped in the mall and than went to TGIF for lunch again. We both thought the meal was better and cheaper in Chili's. Anyway, we left at 3:30pm to head to Centro Medico as Larry's appointment was at 4:30pm. We went to medical records to pick up Larry's results from the last year when we had complete physicals. We also picked up his lab results. Even though we had an appointment at 4:30, Larry didn't get to see the doctor until almost 5:30. He was with her nearly an hour and said she was excellent. She did her medical training in the US at Mt. Sinai in NY so she has to be good as that hospital has a superb reputation. She told him he needs to have some tests but she definitely thinks there are some problems. She gave him a prescription to start taking. We wanted to have the tests done here but they couldn't take us until Monday so she gave us a name of a doctor to see in PLC. We didn't get back to the hotel till almost 6:30. We had almost missed Happy Hour! So, we had a quick drink and than went to the same pizza place we went with Giulio last night. We didn't like the buffet menu in the hotel. We were going to go back to PLC tomorrow but Elias is working on the boat so could use us out of his way for a while. So we just decided to stay in Caracas for one more day. |