This is the end of our first week onboard, and I am beginning to get used to boat life once again. It was a HOT New Year’s in Vero Beach, which is a very odd experience for us! We left our family in Baltimore on the very day that cold weather hit the northeast, where our part of Connecticut had its first snow. This is the first year that I won’t see any snow, unless there is still some around when I return in May—unlikely!
Some hot scenes from Vero Beach…
New Year’s Eve lunch at Cobalt, the restaurant in the Kimpton Hotel that looks out at the Atlantic–quite a luxurious spot for a New Year’s Eve lunch. I had no interest in going out to dinner because that would entail a late night dinghy ride back to the boat in a dark harbor. It gives me the shivers to think about drunken dinghy drivers in an unfamiliar harbor. I chose lunch!
Traditional holiday decorations look rather out of place down here to me.
But there are plenty of lovely sights to see, like resurrection ferns which are flourishing right now since there has been plenty of rain.
Along one of the streets we walk we saw these large shrubs in bloom. What are they?
I’ve spent some time arranging our things, especially Christmas gifts from our kids that I simply could not leave behind, in order to make our new Pandora look homey.
After 20 years of celebrating New Year’s Eve with our good friends Kari and Gerhard our current celebrations have not been nearly as fun and interesting. Change is inevitable, and I’m not saying we didn’t have a very nice evening this year….I just couldn’t help also feeling such a fondness for our past New Year’s gatherings with dear friends.
During our second day here we visited a nursery and farm stand in Ft. Pierce called Nelson Family Farms where I bought some herbs and a pink geranium that Bob planted together in a window box. Nelsons is now my new favorite plant nursery in this area. There were so many choices of plants, and the fruit and veggie offerings on display were really tempting–I wanted to buy way more than we could store in Pandora’s galley. One thing I found really tempting was chick peas still in their seed pods. I’ve never seen that before!
I bought a phalenopsis– a hybrid color break white/magenta, and a rosemary plant in its own pot since it needs drier conditions than the other herbs (parsley, chives and thyme) that I wanted together in the window box. Along with these I also have some paper whites from home that were a gift from my friend Tina. So we have quite a bit of garden going for a boat! It makes me happy, and most of all I am always amazed at how quickly things grow in warm, maritime conditions–and how sturdy they get after a week or so in strong breezes. It will only take a few weeks before I will be able to harvest as many herbs as we need everyday. At home it would take from early May ’til mid-July before I could do that.
To bring a little holiday cheer onboard since it was not yet New Year’s, Bob picked some greenery with red berries from an empty lot, along with some long stemmed white begonias. Rather festive–though certainly not in the vein of traditional ‘northern’ Christmas decorating. We tried hard to come with something that would NOT look as silly as a red bow and bells on a palm tree!
To put a fine point on the kind of slow internet we cruisers experience, I’d like to explain that every photo I included in this post took from 20 – 30 minutes to upload. Then some of them just failed entirely and had to be redone. One of them–the window box planter– has uploaded sideways, and I’m far too exhausted to fix it at this point. I started this post at 8 am, took a 1 1/2 hour break to go out to lunch, and it is now somewhat after 4 pm. Really, I wonder why I bother! It’s got to be my maniacal stubbornness.
For this last photo, when I truly thought I would lose my cool waiting, I decided to untangle a mess of size 20, 6-cord cordonet that I’d like to use for a project. Because of the high twist it had tangled into quite a mess. How’s that for manical?? While highly frustrating with the internet I chose to use my downtime doing another chore that was equally highly frustrating…. For most of the time I was detangling it looked like the detangling event would win over the uploading-photo event. At the last moment the photo won, and thank heaven, because I might have cried.
I have more news but no more patience. So until I recuperate enough for another frustrating, slow internet moment I’ll stop here.
P.S. I fixed the window box photo. Whew!
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