We have just lowered the price of the epub books from $7.95 to $6.95! Woo hoo!

Part 1 of The Unexpected Circumnavigation is available in e-pub at Lulu, iTunes, and Barnes and Noble.com. It is also available in paper format from Lulu and Amazon. Currently, Part 2 is available in both paper and e-book formats at Lulu. Part 2 should be available at the other retailers within 10 weeks. We’ll let you know when the other sites have the books listed.

If you’ve read either book and liked it, please write a review on any of the retail sites above, or on GoodReads.com. We’d appreciate it!

Our upcoming workbook, Recipe for Success: What Cruising Aboard My Own Boat Will Cost Me was about 95% done when Keith was born. We haven’t worked on it since, but we plan to finish it as soon as Keith is a little less needy.

Christi will start working on The Unexpected Circumnavigation Part 3: Oman to Gibraltar as soon as Recipe for Success is done. We estimate it will take her about 10 months to write it once she gets started.

In personal news, Keith is now 8 weeks old. Right around Keith’s one month birthday, he turned into a colicky screamer. After about 2.5 difficult weeks, we figured out he has acid reflux. Christi changed her diet and we bought some herbal remedies. Keith is now doing better overall, but he still has bouts of pain. When he is feeling good, he is absolutely adorable. He loves to smile. 

Keith has recently started to coo. He is currently learning how to use his hands. It is fun to watch him figure out things that we take for granted.

We’ve taken him out on three boat rides now. He seems to be indifferent to the boat so far. We got him the smallest life jacket that West Marine carries, but as you can see, it is huge!

Someone asked if we had Baby on Board burgee. We don’t, but we do have a Baby on Board sign. Keith wasn’t happy when we snapped this photo.

All the baby gear we got for Kosmos has been working out great. We use the glider chair for breast feeding, the diaper changing station in the forward stateroom, and during the night he sleeps in the little folding bassinet next to our bed in the mid-stateroom.

We took Keith out for his first cruise yesterday. It was just a quick bay trip to keep Kosmos exercised. We put Keith in the car seat in the pilot house for the duration of the trip. He seemed to really like the engine noise. While underway, he mostly slept. However, during docking he figured out he was not the center of attention and got upset.

Keith has been a good baby overall, doing all the usual things. Christi is recovering nicely. We think we have adjusted pretty well to taking care of Keith. Christi has commented that waking up a couple times for 30-45 minutes to breast feed and diaper change in the middle of the night is easier than having to wake up for a 4 hour watch during a passage!

Sleepy time:

Family shot:

Road warrior:

Thanks so much for all the well wishes!

We think his middle name is pretty cool since a grandpa is Fred, and his father is Eric, and his first name begins with a K. Fred –> Eric –> K, Frederick.

And something else fun, his was born on 3/16, and in the hospital we are in room 316.

All the baby books claim that a glider chair and/or rocker are must haves for every nursery, both for feeding and for soothing a fussy child. So when one of our friends offered to give us her used glider and ottoman, we jumped at the opportunity. Most Nordhavn 43s don’t have room for such a large piece of furniture, but when we ordered Kosmos we decided to remove the port side settee and replace it with cabinets. Yes, we lost some seating, but it made some of the juiciest storage space on the boat even more accessible and gave us more floor space. We’ve always been glad we made the choice to eliminate the settee. But when the glider came into the picture, we were more happy than ever about it!

Much to our amazement, the glider and ottoman fit exactly perfect in the space available, and the glider’s wood is the same color as Kosmos’s! Yes, the blue upholstery clashes with Kosmos’s red and gold color scheme, but we can easily have the chair re-upholstered if we desire. The glider is also much more comfortable than the settee would have been, which will be important given how much time we anticipate we will be sitting in it. We assume most of the feedings will take place in this chair.

Another must have according to the baby books is a diaper changing station. Traditionally, most people buy a changing table, but in recent years, changing tables have lost popularity. More and more people instead buy a contoured changing pad, which has raised sides so the baby can’t roll off the pad, and simply place the pad on a dresser in the nursery. Of course, only having a changing pad is perfect for Kosmos.

We’d planned to keep the pad on the desk in the forward stateroom, with a basket of diapers, wipes and other supplies on the desk next to the pad. However, the pad was bigger than we had anticipated, so we had to move the diaper station to the bed, instead. The little bit of green you can see behind the pad is a bag of diapers and next to the diapers, barely visible in the photo, is the basket of toiletries, which includes stuff like baby wipes, deoderized plastic bags to wrap the diapers in, diaper rash cream, etc. (As an FYI, the changing pad is Babies R Us brand. The brown, soft textured cover and white waterproof pad sitting atop the cover are both made by Boppy.)

Finally, here is our cute Mother’s Touch Baby Bather made by Summer Infant. It fits on the seat in the master stateroom shower. All we have to do is strap him into the chair, stick the chair in the shower, and carefully wash him down with the hand held shower head. (The hand held shower head is standard on the 43, and it is another feature that works out extraordinarily well for baby care.)

When not in use, the chair folds up and can be stored under the sink. (Just in case you are wondering, the green case under the bathing chair is oxygen.)

This is Part 2 of a series on Outfitting Kosmos for a Baby. Read Part 1 here.

We left West Thumb Geyser Basin and headed south towards Yellowstone’s southern exit. Bordering Yellowstone is yet another national park, The Grand Teton National Park, which features one of the world’s most spectacular mountain chains, the Teton Range. These precipitous mountains rise directly out of the beautiful Jackson Hole valley. Being geologically young, little erosion has taken place, leaving extremely jagged and photogenic peaks. The largest of the mountains in the Teton range is Grand Teton, which peaks at 13,770 feet. A series of beautiful lakes sit at the base of the mountains.

While the Grand Teton park is quite large at 310,000 acres (including 40 miles of mountain range), it is tiny compared to Yellowstone. The park was first established in 1929, but it was much smaller then. Between 1930s to 1950s, and then again in the 70s, surrounding land, particularly in Jackson Hole Valley, was purchased and added to the park.

Grand Teton is outside the volcanic caldera, so it does not have thermal attractions like Yellowstone does. But there are many things about the Grand Teton park that make it special beyond the scenic mountains. It is one of the few places where that still feature the same species of flora and fauna that have existed since prehistoric time. There is a rich ecosystem with more than 1,000 species of plants, dozens of species of mammals, 300 species of birds, more than a dozen fish species, and even reptiles and amphibians. There are about a dozen small glaciers in the highest regions. Some of the rocks in the park are 2.7 billion years old, the oldest of any US national park.

As much as we would have loved to do more sightseeing in both Yellowstone and Grand Teton, we were running out of time. We drove through the southern portion of Yellowstone and all of the Grand Teton park without stopping until we got to our destination of Jackson, Wyoming. As you can see, the drive was gorgeous! And we didn’t even capture it all. We’re not sure exactly where one park ends and the next begins, but we know the first photo was near West Thumb Geyser Basin and the last photo in this series is at Moran Junction, which is just south of Grand Teton Park.

Once we got to Jackson, the first thing we did was hunt down a place to stay. We found a beautiful inn called The Alpine House, located right in downtown.

After checking in, we took a walk around downtown in search of a restaurant to have dinner at. Here are a few snapshots of Jackson. As you can see, it is cute and rustic. There were several wood ski chalet type buildings similar to The Alpine House (above). There were also several log cabin style buildings around, like this church built in 1911.

As well as several of these western storefront styles.And this little chalet style red brick.There is a ski resort right in town, too, though it didn’t look like it had much snow left.

We chose an organic Indian restaurant called Lotus Cafe that had phenomenally good food. It was a great way to end such a great day!

This is Part 18 of the Passage Across America series. Read Part 17 here. Part 19 coming soon!

We arrived at the Old Faithful Geyser, probably the biggest attraction in the park, around lunch time. As the name indicates, it is a geyser that can be counted on to erupt every 60 to 110 minutes. How long one eruption lasts indicates how long it will be before the next eruption, so a naturalist keeps tabs on the eruptions and posts a sign indicating when they think the next one will occur. It was nice to look at the sign and know we had some time to kill before the next eruption. Instead of sitting outside in the cold, we wandered into the nearby General Store and had lunch.

Shortly before the estimated spout time, we found seats in front of the geyser and settled in for the show. The water temperature inside the vent is 204 degrees Fahrenheit, so some steam generally comes out of the geyser most of the time.

The steam steadily grew in intensity, then some water started to spout out with the steam:

And then she really blew, maintaining this amount of intense pressure for several minutes. We aren’t sure how high the water went, but the range is 106 feet to 180 feet, and the average is 130 feet. We’d say 130 feet was a reasonable estimation. Between 3,700 and 8,400 gallons of water are expelled per eruption.

When we planned this trip, we had carefully mapped out an aggressive route that would get us across the country and back in three weeks. There was no room in the itinerary for delays or major detours. As we mentioned in the last post, it never occurred to us that snow would be an issue so late in the year; we were shocked to find most of the roads in Yellowstone were still closed due to snow. In order to keep to our intended route, we needed to leave the park today via the south exit. Much to our astonishment, they opened the south road today! We were amazed by our good fortune. We hopped into the car and onto the south road, stopping at several sites along the way out.

The first stop was at the Black Sand Basin, located in the Upper Geyser Basin, another walking trail that makes a 1/4 mile loop. The area gets its name from black obsidian (volcanic glass) sand, and has several unique thermal attractions:

1. Spouter Geyser: Erupts for 10 – 11 hours at a time, stops for 1 to 2 hours, then spouts again. The spouts range from 5 – 7 feet; water temperature is 200 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a little bubbling mud pool next to it, but since the sign didn’t mention the mud pool, we are guessing it probably dries up after the snow melt ends.

2. Cliff Geyser is located on the edge of Iron Creek, and goes off at irregular intervals. Though there are usually one or two eruptions a day, there may be weeks or even years of dormancy. An indication of a pending eruption is that the crater nearly fills with boiling water. As the eruption begins, jets of water and steam explode through the pool 15 to 40 feet high. The spout can last from 30 minutes to 3 hours, though the height peaks the first half hour and gradually subsides until the crater empties.

3. Green Spring had no information posted.

4. Emerald Pool is only 154 degrees Fahrenheit, so certain algae can live in this water but not the hotter springs and pools. That is why this pool is green and most of the others are blue.

5. Rainbow Pool is actually a geyser that doesn’t erupt very often — the last one was in 1973. It got its name because the bacteria mat around the edges is supposedly brilliantly rainbow colored. We must have picked a bad day because the ring just looked mostly yellow to us.

6. Sunset Lake got its name from the yellow and orange bacteria mat around the edges. It is also a rarely active geyser; when it does erupt, the water reaches 3 – 8 feet high. Mostly the water that bubbles up overflows the edges and runs down to Rainbow Pool. Forgive the oddly angled photo. It is of the edge of the lake and a little bit of a runoff channel. It lets you see some of the bright blue middle along with the algae mat.

We hopped back in the car and continued south. We’ve seen lots of buffalo on the road today, but this was an especially good photo:

The next stop was Kepler Cascades, a waterfall on the Firehole River. There are multiple drops, the longest being 50 feet, with a total drop of approximately 125 feet.  As you can see, the trail up was snowy, but fortunately, it wasn’t a long walk.

Our next stop was West Thumb Geyser Basin, a thumb-like projection off Yellowstone Lake. 125,000 years ago, a massive explosion created a caldera along the edge of the lake. The water is deeper here than the rest of the lake, with warm pockets year round, and the shoreline has a wide variety of thermal features. Since the mid 1970s, some temperatures within West Thumb have cooled and thermal activity has decreased. There are two waking trails here, both loops, one 1/4 mile and the other 1/2 mile. We were surprised at all there was to see here. Here are some of the highlights.

1. Abyss Pool is is the deepest pool known in Yellowstone and received its name for its abyss-like depth (53 feet). Coins and other debris thrown in have caused the vent to plug, reducing spring flow and the pool temperature (now 172°F), allowing abundant algae growth along the edge and run-off channels.

2. Black Pool is surrounded by orange-colored microbial mats, which grow abundantly in the low temperature (132°F) of the pool.

3. Big Cone — you have to look carefully at this picture to see it. In the foreground is a white earthen mound with a small opening in it. Behind the cone is the frozen lake with a few small melted spots. No information was posted on the sign.

4. Fishing Cone is situated on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. Fishermen used to stand on the cone and cast their lines into the lake to catch fish. Without taking the fish off the hook they parboiled them in the vent of Fishing Cone. The shoreline has changed since those times and now Fishing Cone is usually inundated by high water during the early summer. The cold water of the lake seems to have rendered the cone dormant. But as you can see in the photo, steam still rises from it and the heat from the cone has created a melted area in the middle of the otherwise frozen lake.The second shot gives you an idea of how large the warm spot is.

5. Lakeshore Geyser is also right on the lake’s shore. It has 198.6°F water inside and goes off at irregular intervals. The eruptions last 10 minutes and are 20 – 30 feet high. Sadly, it didn’t perform for us.

Another hot pool (and we are guessing geyser) along the edge of the lake with no sign. We are guessing the funnel in the first photo is where the water comes out. The second photo is of us next to the same hot spot a little farther down the walkway.

This was an unmarked algae mat.

Bluebell Pool had no information on the sign. These two pools were side by side, so we aren’t sure which one is bluebell or if they both comprise bluebell.

Thumb Paint Pots apparently used to be thicker, like the Fountain Paint Pots in the Lower Geyser Basin, but since the thermal shift in the 70s more water collects in there, making it almost a spring. On the right edge of the mud you can see the pots were bubbling — the cones are from the thermal activity .

Ledge Spring had no information on the sign.

Perforated Pool had no information on the sign.

No sign on this one, but we like this shot because you can see the frozen lake behind the hot pools, which emphasizes the temperature differential.

Since this post has gotten ridiculously long, we’ll stop here. In a few days, we’ll put up another post completing  Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

This is Part 17 of the Passage Across America series. Read Part 16 here and Part 18 here. 

We have gotten more feedback on The Unexpected Circumnavigation: Unusual Boat, Unusual People Part 2: Australia to Oman. So far, all the feedback has been good, with more than half of the people telling us they like Part 2 better than Part 1. We would be grateful if people who have read the books would rate them on Lulu or Amazon.

We’re still trying to finish up the Recipe for Success: What My Cruising Will Cost Me workbook. As we said in the last update, the workbook’s content is mostly complete; the hold up is formatting challenges. With so much going on with getting ready for the baby, it has been easy to procrastinate on the re-formatting, but we are still slowly plugging away at it.

In personal news, Christi is now 36 weeks pregnant. One month left and counting! Christi’s pregnancy is still mild compared to most women and as far as the doctors can tell, the baby seems to be healthy. Christi still feels about the same as last reported: increasingly uncomfortable and tired, with a serious case of “baby brain.” The fact that she thinks and moves so slowly frustrates her to no end. Things she used to take for granted like bending over and sitting up in bed are now really hard for her.

At 34 weeks, Christi finally accepted that she is physically incapable of washing Kosmos anymore — it simply requires too much bending and exertion of energy — and hired a boat washer. However, we are still taking the boat out regularly, and Christi is still manning the lines. Here is a picture of Christi at 35 weeks, about to tie Kosmos up.

Since you can’t tell how big her belly is in the picture above, here is a shot of her taken later the same day. The photo is a bit blurry, but you can’t miss the bump. Much to her disbelief, she is even bigger now than she was last week when the photo was taken!

Knowing reservations to stay in the lodges in Yellowstone needed to be made at least a year in advance, we had brought camping gear and planned to camp inside the park. However, on May 11th and 12th, it snowed. We had no idea that in the northern latitudes snow still fell so late in the year. We just assumed it would be warm and balmy; none of our camping gear was meant for super cold weather.

Not wanting to freeze to death, on the morning of the 13th, we desperately tried to find a hotel room in or around the park. We called Yellowstone’s switch board, who thought we were trying to make reservations for next year. When we clarified we meant that very night, they didn’t know what to do! They didn’t normally deal with last minute callers. After checking with a manager, we were told they had one and only one room available. We had lucked out! Knowing we had a place to stay, we proceeded to Yellowstone, as planned.

Yellowstone sits on top of one of the largest active volcanoes on earth. It last erupted 640,000 years ago, and the force of the eruption made the volcano collapse into a 45 mile by 35 mile steaming caldera (crater), one of the largest in the world. A hot spot of magma still remains under the park, creating unique hydrothermal features. Due to its unique landscape, Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872.

We spent the night at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, an upscale hotel.

We had a phenomenal dinner at the hotel, with a main of Wild Boar Tenderloin brined with molasses and served with an apple ginger glaze. The sides are buttermilk mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables. No, the wild boar served were not trapped in the park. The boar are actually farm raised outside the park. Farm raised wild boar is supposedly healthier and more environmentally friendly than farm raised cattle.

Continuing on where we left off… Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. 

While reading the Yellowstone Today newspaper at breakfast, we were interested to see that in January and February alone this year there were over 1800 small earthquakes here in Yellowstone, most less than 3 on the Richter scale. Normal activity is 2,000 earthquakes a year, most small. While the swarm of quakes is well above normal activity level, it isn’t unprecedented, so geologists aren’t concerned. Interestingly enough, it is these small earthquakes that keep sediment from settling so that the various hydrothermal sites stay active.

Inside the park there is no wifi connection. Eric had urgent business he needed to take care of, so after breakfast we hopped in the car to drive northwest to the nearest town, West Yellowstone, Montana, to find an Internet connection. On the way, we stopped at the Midway Geyser Basin walking trail, which is a half-mile walkway with three unique thermal attractions along the way:

1. Excelsior Geyser Crater was once the world’s biggest active geyser. Geysers are hot springs with constrictions in their plumbing that prevents hot water from bubbling up. While cool water sits on top, the water deep in the pool gets heated, creating steam that builds pressure. The pressure eventually builds up enough to force the water and steam past the constriction and up into the air.

Excelsior Geyser used to regularly erupt, with bursts between 50 and 300 feet high. In 1890, the geyser’s force blew itself out, transforming it from a geyser into a crater. The water is 200 degrees Fahrenheit, so it gives off a lot of steam. Since it was a cold day, we couldn’t see much of the crater through the vast amounts of steam.

Since the blowout happened, there have been a few eruptions with water shooting upward, but for the most part, it is now a thermal spring where the water simply flows over the edges of the crater and into the nearby Firehole River at a rate of 4,000 gallons per minute.

2. Grand Prismatic Spring is the third largest hot spring in the world at 200 feet wide. 500 gallons per minute of hot water (between 147 – 188 degrees Fahrenheit) bubble up from fissures in the rocks and run off into the nearby Firehole River. What makes this hot spring so special are the brilliant colors. The center of the spring is an intense blue. The outer edges of the pool and runoff channels have colorful microbes living in them, creating vivid yellow, orange and brown colors around the ring of blue. Once again, the cold day made the hot steam all the more intense, obscuring the view of the spring. The first shot is a runoff channel and you can kind of see the blue pool in the background through the steam. In the second shot, you can see the intense yellow ring surrounding the pool, and if you look carefully, can sort of see the pool to the back left.

3. The Turquoise Pool is 100 x 110 feet, the water temperature is 142-160°F and the water drains through seepage into the ground around it instead of through irrigation channels. The cooler temps and less active water movement meant less steam and better visibility.

We got back on the road. In addition to passing some buffalo meandering down the highway), we also passed a herd of elk grazing near the road:

Here is a Talus, or a cliff that has been broken up by sun and snow into a huge rock pile. Sometimes talus can drift, which essentially make them “rock glaciers.”

West Yellowstone, Montana is a cute little town, very stereotypical “old west” looking. It was established in 1908 after the Union Pacific railroad built a terminus there. The town’s sole purpose was to be a gateway to Yellowstone Park.

While there, we made a quick visit to the Yellowstone Historic Center, housed in the oldest building in town, the old Union-Pacific train depot.

Once Eric’s business was taken care of, we headed back into Yellowstone Park. Here is a shot of buffalo grazing in the field.

Unfortunately, because it was so early in the year, many of the attractions were closed. Most of the park was still buried in snow and the roads to access the snowier sites hadn’t yet been cleared. The animals tended to congregate in the thawed areas, so even much of the thawed areas were closed off to humans — partly to let the animals live in peace, partly to keep people safe from potentially aggressive animals (especially hungry bears that have just woken up from hibernation). The Fountain Paint Pot Nature Trail in the Lower Geyser Basin was open, another half-mile walking loop that passed by many unique geological sites:

1. The Celestine Pool, which seems to be just a regular hot spring, but with boiling water. In the second picture, you can clearly see the “bacteria mat,” or the colorful bacteria that live in the warm muddy water around the spring. In addition to interesting colors, the bacteria make the texture of the mud weird, too. The ground looks like it is parched and dry, not muddy.

2. We didn’t see a sign indicating the name of this one:

3. Fountain Paint Pots, which are basically bubbling mud pools. Volcanic rock, mineral, acid and living organisms combine with heat, gas and water to create a clay like mud. The color and consistency vary based on time of year. Being as it was early spring, the mud was thin from all the snow melt. Apparently, when the mud is thicker it is more interesting.

4. Fumaroles, which are basically just vents that let the hot air out from under the Earth’s crust.

5. Red Spouter is technically a fumarole, but in the wet season it fills with water, making it appear like a small geyser. Red Spouter is a new attraction. It formed on August 17, 1959, after a 7.5 magnitude earthquake centered 25 miles away rocked the park. Prior to that, this was a grassy knoll.

6. Leather Pool, which is only lukewarm and contains a brown bacteria.

7. Clepsydra Geyser, which supposedly erupts constantly, but it didn’t erupt while we were there. However, since it was cold, we didn’t hang around very long waiting for an eruption, either.

After we finished the nature trail, we went to see the Old Faithful Geyser, probably the biggest attraction in the park. Since this is already an extraordinarily long post, we’ll stop here for now. Over the next week or so, we’ll put up a couple more posts completing Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21, starting with Old Faithful.

This is Part 16 of the Passage Across America series. Read Part 15 here and Part 17 here.