SailingKnitter

Jonesy and his old lady cart

Our life on the boat in Marathon, FL has settled down into a comfortable routine. We've located the grocery stores, Kmart and Wendy's (I love their apple, pecan, blue cheese chicken and real green lettuce salad). These are the places that we walk, walk, walk to every couple of days. It's over a mile each way but as you can see in the photo, it is absolutely FLAT and there is a nice sidewalk. The scenery is blah and very noisy along the highway, but we are so grateful to have a place to walk safely at a good clip.

That's a long way to haul our goodies back to the dinghy dock so we braved going into Kmart (sad dying store) and bought an old-lady cart. See, we're "seniors" so we can officially use one of these in public. Having a cart means that we can also take advantage of the Buy-One-Get-One-Free sales. You know, in Central America there aren't sales like this in the grocery stores. The prices are basically the same every day. Sensibly, little jars of stuff cost less than big jars. The biggest "deal" you can expect is to get a plastic cup or dish taped onto the side of your laundry soap as a freebie. Even post-holiday themed goodies are not discounted.

Here in the states, when say, French's Mustard is on sale, we pay less per container for the giant size than any of the smaller sizes. It's been kinda fun, but then our small fridge is a limiting factor. But the money we save on these items helps to counteract the gut-wrenching shock of the fresh produce prices when compared to Central America! We've been told that those prices will get somewhat lower as we head north out of the keys. Let's hope so as we do love our fruits and veggies.

I knit in Key West

For entertainment we picked up the local commuter bus for a ride down to Key West. It's only $1.50 for seniors for a 45-mile ride - and we got to go over the famous 7-mile bridge and see all the little keys along the way. It's a beautiful ride that I highly recommend if you're in the area and a bargain even at the younger people price.

It was lovely being in Key West again as it really does have a very different atmosphere than Marathon. Key West has lots of big shade trees which makes walking along the streets so comfortable. After lunch at Harpoon Harry's diner, we sat and watched the free-range chickens and I knit. There had been a tremendous rain storm the night before (but not up in Marathon) so the city was freshly washed and the plants glowed.

Key West Rooster and chicks

Yipppeee! We sold (cheap, cheap) all of our Central America and Belize cruising guide books and charts this morning to another couple on a catamaran. That's a lot of weight and cubic inches leaving our boat. We weren't even sad a bit...we've had our adventures in that part of the world and are looking forward to different types of experiences along the Eastern Seaboard of the US.

In the meantime, I knit. The pink, green, and white socks on the last blog post are just about done and should be ready to photograph tomorrow. As my take-along project that travels with me at all times, this little pair of monster socks are ready to go. The yarns were donated by a fellow knitter for the kids in Kazakhstan. I changed yarns every 5 rounds - that made a lot of yarn tails to weave in later. I'm warped though as I love to do this type of finishing work. It reminds me of doing needlepoint or crewel embroidery because of the careful stitching and amount of concentration required to have a good result.

Denise Wild Ones #2

OK, I've got to get dressed now as we're going to dinghy over to the club (ware)house for a couple of hours. I have signed up for another Craftsy class, this one to learn how to do shuttle tatting. The class videos require lot of computer usage of bits and bytes. We pay by the downloaded bit for our wifi on the boat so we go use the free wifi that's available to us as part of our anchoring fee when we need to watch videos.

Also on Craftsy, I have taken a sweater sizing course and I need to watch it again so that I can upload all of the calculations in to my MS Excel spread sheet. If you haven't discovered the many different courses on Craftsy yet I highly recommend that you take a look at their offerings. I'd love to take a cake decorating class just for fun too.

Oh, and at the club house we'll be meeting up with the folks who bought our cruising guides to chat about our experiences in Central America and share tips.

Life is good.