Another week has gone by since we wrote the last post, 18 days into our stay in the USA. We are absolutely thrilled to report that Eric’s mom went home from the convalescent home a few days ago. Her rapid improvement has been nothing short of amazing. Yes, she is still very sick, but seeing her get so much better so fast, it is easy to forget how sick she really is. We now have a lot of hope that she will beat the cancer altogether.

Now that she is doing better, at home, and her treatment and care strategies have been more or less situated, Eric’s parents have urged us to go back to the boat and continue with Our Plans. Once we got their blessing to go, we booked a flight back to Egypt. We leave in a couple of days.

In the beginning, Eric’s family was opposed to our trip. Now his parents are our biggest trip supporters and blog fans, which makes us happier than you can imagine. Eric’s parents enjoy hearing about our daily life and travel adventures via the blog, which are much more detailed than we could ever go into verbally. More than ever we feel they are traveling with us.

Though we are sad to be leaving our families, we are ready to get back to our own house (Kosmos is our house now), and to the slow paced cruising life we love. Our last few days at home have become more hectic than ever. We are trying to wrap up as many loose ends as possible before we go (wrapping them all up is impossible, just as it was when we left last year), get a slew of boat parts, cram in things like eye doctor appointments, spend time with some of our nieces and nephews, and of course, visit with Eric’s parents. Here is a picture of Eric and his beloved mom:

And, on to a blog question:

Q: Why can’t you guys go on dives by yourself? Is it just not safe?

A: We could go diving alone if we really wanted to, but we choose not to for three reasons. One, we are not familiar with the hazards of the local areas, such as strong currents, rip tides, dangerous creatures, and so forth. People can get themselves into a lot of trouble when they are not fully aware of the risks involved in a particular location.

Second, unless we happened to be anchored in a coral reef (rare, as they are usually not favored anchorages), for safety purposes, we should have someone manning the dinghy. We need two people under the water and one in the boat, and we rarely have a third person around who doesn’t want to be in the water, too.

Third, dive masters know where the good diving is. Yes, there are maps that give you the general vicinity of good diving spots, but you only have about an hour of air, so if you don’t know exactly where to go, you may spend your hour searching for the good spot and never find it. If you are with a really good dive master, they know where all the animals live, and as they take you around, they point out the various creatures that are easy to miss. For example, on our dive in Oman, the dive master showed us several bottom dweller fish that look just like sand. We would have never seen them if it weren’t for her expertise. She also showed us several octopus hiding holes, and we caught two of them getting it on when we peeped into their little hole. But, had she not pointed their little hole, we would have missed them altogether. We think just having the sea creatures pointed out to us is worth the money of the dive, and we are always disappointed when we get a dive master that doesn’t make the effort to point stuff out to us.