Vacation from Vacation

Although only someone who hasn’t done it would call full-time cruising in foreign ports a “vacation”, still it has many vacation aspects. We recently left our boat and drove 3000 miles to northern Washington state to take care of some necessary business including yearly medical visits. Although the cool air here is a relief from the increasingly jungle-like weather in Puerto Vallarta area, we also miss our little Mexican village and community.

It’s lovely seeing old friends and visiting old haunts, but our new home is still tugging at the back of our minds and it won’t be long before we turn south and head back that way.

Luckily we found traveling in this time of virus that it is not too difficult to take health precautions. The hotels are taking special cleaning steps and are not too full anyway. Plus we have had the great luck of having an empty house to stay in both in San Francisco and in Bellingham. By bringing most of our food we rarely have to be around unknown people for more than moments at a time. And of course driving in our own car is quite safe.

The border is the only place we were confined in a public space and, not unexpectedly, being Arizona, the only place where Jon had to go into an office where people were not wearing masks – and who were complaining about the extra hours they had to work because of their COVID-affected coworkers. Yikes! We had been stopped at secondary inspection for a misunderstanding about what we could bring in. We were stuck there for about 2 hours in a room with bars and, in a subtle torture move, with a TV that could not be turned off and alternately played informational articles about tractors and Jesus-loves-me music of the over-sweet variety. To add to this torture Zoë was caged separately, out of view but not out of hearing, and yipped and howled the entire time. At least no one else was locked up with us. Eventually they asked Jon upstairs to the office area to pay the fine. Our agent kept her mask on but the other agents in the open office area were unmasked. This is Arizona, second only to Florida in dangerous head-strong refusal to listen to reason. Because of this possible exposure we have been very careful since then. Fourteen days later we feel we have passed that barrier and are “normal-careful” rather than “extreme-careful”.

For now we are enjoying our sabbatical. Stay safe, friends.

Postscript

I have just heard that several fishermen from a family in La Cruz have recently died from COVID. Please consider contributing to the La Cruz Food Pantry as just a little bit from you could mean a lot to the families who have been out of work for four months and now are beginning to face illness and death in their families as well. These are good folks living very simply and we all can help.