31 December 2000 Year in Review
January-February:
We celebrate New Years' 2000 in Antigua with champagne
and dancing and the harbor lit up with fireworks at midnight. Ed's Aunt Esther dies at the age of 92, and we fly to the US,
sorry to see her go, but enjoy
visiting everyone.
March-April:
Trinidad for
Carnival. The limbo is unbelievable / impossible
with dancers going under a bar balanced on coke bottles. Nothing
but their feet touch the floor. Lots of "people floats": people
dressed in fabulous costumes so elaborate that they're on wheels.
J'Ouvert where we dress up in old clothes and spend the night dancing
in the streets ducking mud and paint which is liberally tossed at
anyone who stands still for more than a second. In the wee hours of the
morning we troop to MacDonald's for a little bit of home and sanity. Then to bed to sleep until the next night's
festivities. What a ball! What fun!
What noise! Would we do it again? We doubt it. Trinidad
is really part of South America that broke off not so long ago
and is now separated by a gulf. The flora and fauna are South American
including the birds, the butterflies and the howler monkeys. They have bird sanctuaries, trips to see flocks of scarlet
ibises come back every evening,
beach sanctuaries where giant turtles come to lay their eggs every spring, hikes into the mountains every
Sunday, and one of the nicest
swimming beaches in the Caribbean. The
cruisers get together for parties, or to help the locals. English is the common language, but boats come here from many countries,
displaying a wide variety of flags to look up. Food
is delicious, and inexpensive. We can eat a good meal out for Trinidad $30TT, less than $5US. Boatwork is inexpensive
and the workers are competent. In
late April we haul the boat and...
May-July:
fly to Europe to see
the midnight sun. We spend a little over
two months and have a wonderful trip. London in a heat spell. We're
not sure we saw any Londoners. Everyone we talk to is a tourist
and just as lost as we are. A train to Edinburgh, Scotland through golden fields of flowering grapeseed. As we go farther
north the fields become stone and
the grapeseed turns to yellow flowering gorse.
In Edinburgh they still drop a ball from a tower at noon everyday
so the ships in the harbor can set their watches. The town is stone.
Everywhere and everything is stone. A
train south to Newcastle to catch an overnight ferry to Bergen,
Norway where we get on the mailboat to Hammerfest, the northernmost
city in the world. We're north of Barrow, Alaska. A lake, 200 feet above sea level, is still frozen and there's
lots of snow in the hills. Our room
faces north and the midnight sun shines in all
night. There is never a twilight or any pink clouds. We rent a car
and drive to Nordkapp, the northern most point in Norway where we watch
the sun glide over the Arctic Sea at midnight. After
a week in Hammerfest, we take the mailboat back to Bergen and catch
a train over the mountains to Oslo. Up and up we go through tunnel
after tunnel (107 by the time we're finished). More and more snow
until we're in six feet of snow and there are glaciers all around. We
go over the top and it's spring. Green, flowers, sun. Oslo is in a protected
bowl and the climate is lovely. There's a ten foot yellow rose
bush in the park across from our hotel. The sun sets here and we have
four hours of twilight with a luminous blue sky. The
ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen is the largest ship we've been on. Copenhagen is a mixture of beautiful old buildings dating
from 1000AD to the very modern with
a sprinkling of decay mixed in. People told
us that it was full of drugs and we had to be careful, but as usual
we walk around everywhere and no one bothers us. The
train to Basel, Switzerland crosses to Germany on a ferry. We spend three days in Davos, three days in Zermatt, and three
days in Montreux. Davos is ski
country. We take a cable car to the top and walk
down -- two and a half hours. At the bottom there's a little restaurant
with the best ice cream. As we eat a cowherd comes down the road
followed by his cows with all their bells ringing. The Glacier Express
train takes us to Zermatt which is famous for the Matterhorn. Three
cable cars to go up to the Little Matterhorn where people are still
skiing. Snow covered mountains surround us. Another train through
mountains to Montreux on the east end of Lake Geneva in French Switzerland. A micro climate keeps the weather mild enough for
oleanders to bloom. The walk along
the lake is a flower garden. This is
our favorite place. A train to
France and Paris where we spend six days. The collection
of art in the Louvre leaves us in awe. The Picasso gallery a
few blocks away stretches the imagination and a day up the Eiffel tower
stretches the view over Paris. We had begun to learn our way around, walking along the river Seine. Another place we'd like
to spend a year or so. We
catch a train to St. Malo and rent a car to see Mont Saint Michel
with the tide racing in. A ferry to
Poole, England and then a train to Liverpool. England is
fields with little towns scattered around. We never see a megalopolis.
Cities end and fields begin. Liverpool is on the Mercy River
which is a beautiful protected harbor. We board a freighter at night
and the next morning we're locked out of the harbor. The Atlantic
Ocean looks like the Chesapeake Bay on a calm day. We're allowed the run of the ship and spend a good part of each
twenty four hours on the bridge,
especially when a pilot is on board. When we go up
the James River to Richmond, the pilot never once looks at a chart. As
we go around one S bend the pilot tells the helmsman to make 43 course
changes. We leave the ship, rent a
car to drive to Maryland, and start our US
visit.
July-August:
We drive from
Maryland to North Carolina to Alabama to Florida visiting family: Amy, Halle, and Ruth in Maryland,
Shelby, Emily and Andy in Fuquay
Varina, NC outside of Raleigh, Dale in Bryson City
in the mountains, Elizabeth in Birmingham who surprises us by getting
married, Joe and Shirley Cain in Tallahassee from Goddard past, and
then Wendy's brother Gerry and Marianne in Pompano Beach. September-October: We fly from Miami to Trinidad on Sept. 7
and spend two weeks getting the
SPACESHIP Earth ready to sail again. With new bottom
paint we sail up and down the west coast in the Gulf of Paria. At
anchor one morning the boat bumps up and down several times as if we were
being lifted then dropped. A 6.4 earthquake somewhere in the island
sent 5 or 6 shock waves that raised and dropped all the water and
the whole island -- what power! So now we've had a volcano and an earthquake.
What next? Wary of pirate stories in Venezuela and off Honduras
we sail out the Dragon's Mouth and go north, up the Windward Islands.
November-December:
A beautiful overnight
sail seventy miles to Grenada where we spend a month anchored off Calivigny Island protected
from the sea by outlying reefs.
Farther north to the Tobago Cays, a lagoon with the Atlantic booming on the reefs. On to Bequia where we suffered the swells of Lenny last year.
No Lenny this year. Back (home?) to Antigua for another Christmas. It's all still here.
Green hills surround Falmouth Harbor, Pigeon beach with happy people,
the champagne is still cold, and to our surprise everyone remembers
us from visits in the past. To the west, the belching volcano
on Montserrat Island still animates the view and mixes its wonder
with the passing puffy tradewind clouds. We
on board SPACESHIP Earth hope that you have sailed gentle seas with
rainbows over your bow and that you are looking forward to unwrapping
the package that is your future.
Happy New Year!
Love, Ed and
Wendy