Nobody Likes a Crybaby

                                                

Shot at Green Meadows Petting Farm.

One of the items on our "bye-bye" list was petting a cow.  However, a kid sharing the same pen had his own ideas about whom we should be petting.  (Jane feels compelled to add that she petted the goat, too.  The baby goat was not neglected, even though he WAS a crybaby.  Maybe nobody LIKES a crybaby, but nobody IGNORES a crybaby, either.)

Reality Check (Probably Not the Last of Its Kind)

Jane and I have been to the travel clinic to get vaccinated for diseases prevalent in the areas we plan to sail for the first part of this adventure.  On the form which asks where we plan to travel, Jane (who went yesterday), put "The Caribbean, Central, and South America."  This drew an incredulous look from the receptionist, the purveyor of the form, who told her they needed to know WHICH COUNTRIES in those areas.

It reminds us again that people just don't do what we're doing--even people who travel.  They know where they're going because they generally get there by a plane that lands somewhere specific, and they generally have an itinerary.  All of which is (almost) utterly unnecessary when one travels in one's own house.  Jane explained that we didn't know which countries specifically and this brought forth one of the travel clinic nurses, who apparently thought she'd been summoned to provide a geography lesson to this rather thick traveler.

When Jane explained the method by which we are traveling, she (and by extension I) instantly became travel clinic heroes.  ...Well, of a sort: They both confessed--and I mean confessed--to me that they lived and probably would die in the Milwaukee suburb where they'd been born and that traveling vicariously through the clients that came into the clinic was sufficient for them.

For reasons too tedious to explain, we are only partially inoculated against Yellow Fever, Hep A and B, and Typhoid; we will, in fact, have to finish up in the Bahamas in the winter.  At which point we'll probably throw in shots for places such as "The South Pacific" and "Asia," what the heck.

Name Those 674 Tunes

Today Jane has dedicated herself to our future musical needs.  Between her tastes and mine and with help from Pandora, iTunes, and the three Chinese pop tunes that were pre-loaded on a free MP3 player we got some time ago, it is a very eclectic, but altogether seaworthy collection.

Buying a Boat?

It seems we are buying a boat.... After a few days of suspenseful back-and-forth, the sellers have accepted our offer. The boat is a 1993 Fountaine-Pajot Venezia, a 42 footer that has just completed a circumnavigation. We met the owners, and visited their boat, during our last trip to Annapolis. Love, love, love it. Not because it's sexy. Instead, it seems homey, settled-in. She is an old gal who has been well-loved and cared for, and she's kept her people safe and comfortable for ten years. Soon, we hope, she will do the same for us. Much more to say about Joy, but for now we are wide-eyed, shell-shocked, and mostly speechless.