Gypsy Style For A While: La Paz

Ahoy!

Buenas Dias!

We are in La Paz. We tied up to the docks in Marina Cortez on Monday, the 16th of November. It was a rough 10 hour ride from the anchorage of Ensenada de los Muertos to here. It was one of those, "I never want to do that again," trips. One of us here on the Velvet Sky wound up with a headache and vomiting, that would be me, and I was a worthless crew member. Scott stayed at the helm the entire 10 hours while I was curled up in fetal position in the Bucket's nest praying I wouldn't be needed by either of the boys. They are so good to me! Bucket rested and made himself comfortable as he could eating crackers and granola bars for meals and snacks. Scott got us here, to La Paz safely and as dry as possible (which wasn't really dry because we had left the hatches open on the front of the boat.) The boat was a salty, wet mess by the time we tied up at 16:20.

I felt better soon after docking and pulled together a meal of tandoori/coconut chicken and jasmine rice. Night fall was a welcome gift and sleep came early.

Our first full day in La Paz was quite a nice adventure. We started out the day looking for the TelCel store where we could hopefully purchase a USB stick for internet and a new portable movie player for Bucket. We lost the convenience of the movie player shortly after departing San Diego. I never knew what a gift it was until we spent 3 entire days underway and I was to sole provider for entertainment for our fabulous 4 year old. Read, color, cut, paste, go out on watch....repeat...for hours on end. Yep...I am truly a portable DVD player advocate. I don't know how moms got any personal time before the invention. Oh yes, back to our first full day in La Paz. We did find the TelCel store, however, they were sold out of USB sticks for internet. We purchased a sim card for the cel phone instead.

We discovered the city bus system. It is mostly used by the locals, but we found it very helpful and traveled the city on four different ones that day. And for dinner we had chinese food buffet. We did not find a movie player. Maybe tomorrow.

Our second day started out with Scott washing the salt off of the outside of the boat. Then we went to coffee at the cruisers club. Club Cruseros here in La Paz is a God Send and has helped create a wonderful cruising community. We will be having Thanksgiving dinner with other cruisers. And, rather than lobster we will be enjoying the traditional turkey dinner. I will be bringing cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and stuffing. You must know that fresh cranberries are pretty much unheard of here in Mexico and I was told that since I volunteered the cranberry sauce, I best be on the hunt for canned cranberry now, and I would be lucky if I even found any. Well, lucky, I am. We bought the last 9 cans we found tucked far back on the top shelf in the very sparse canned fruit selection at the Walmart store. Today we find and purchase a movie player.

It is day three in La Paz for us, and a holiday in Mexico. It is Revolution Day. We take our morning walk to the streets and find a shady place to watch the parade. The parade started at 09:00 and ended around 11:30. It was very colorful and done at the slowest pace I could ever imagine a parade to done. I was at one time thinking the parade might go on until dusk, maybe it was meant to be an all day thing.