On Friday morning we said goodbye to Jaime at 05:00. It was time for him to head back to reality. He said it was going to be hard to go back to work and cold weather after all the time off in the tropics. We’ll miss having Jaime around, especially when it comes time to do the waterline again.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Eric and Jaime managed to squeeze some boat chores in between walking around town and going to the dome. They changed the oils on wing and generator engines, as well as the fuel filter on main engine and generator. Jaime washed the boat.

We spent most of Friday and Saturday continuing the boat chores and running errands. We did an inventory of all the supplies we had on board, including food, toiletries, and boat items. While we were pulling things out of cabinets and cubbies anyway, we did a major reorganization of the spaces and a deep cleaning. Someday we’ll get the space ideally utilized. Then we went on some mad shopping trips to stock up on everything we were getting low on, ranging from toothpaste to engine oil and everything in between. We applied for our Indonesian cruising permit, which was more expensive, complicated and time consuming than we had initially expected. We worked on the blog postings and the site.

We know it sounds lame to be in this fabulous tourist destination and to not be doing fun stuff, but the reality is that we haven’t been in a city where we could access everything we could want and need in six months. And it will be over a year before we go to another English speaking country, so while we will be in some big cities in that year, getting supplies will be harder when we can’t read the labels.

On Saturday night, Damien, a friend of Christi’s from her student exchange in South Australia came into town to visit with his partner, Jacqueline, and their two kids, Pim and Koby, who are 3 ½ and 20 months. Saturday night and Sunday we stayed on the boat and visited with our friends. It was really nice to see them and we had a good visit.

We have often wondered what it would be like to cruise with kids. Having the kids on board has helped to give us a taste for what it would be like to live with kids on Kosmos. First off, childproofing this boat isn’t going to be easy. Nor will be setting up cribs, high chairs, play pens and other space consuming paraphernalia that you need when you have little ones. We also get the sense that little kids being cooped up for long passages wouldn’t be good. We know lots of people cruise with little ones and we marvel at how they do it.