And by the magic of our blog not being real-time at the moment (see About the Blog), we can make the weeks speed by in a few posts… We have just completed week two back in the USA. Christi knew she would be very busy the first week or so with life chores, but figured the last two weeks of the trip would be low key, with plenty of time to relax and have fun. Wrong. A few days ago, we got an unexpected surprise. We don’t want to get into details, but this surprise meant a lot of packing, moving things into storage, creatively re-organizing spaces that seemed to be full to make room for more, interviewing a lot of people, doing background checks, and on and on. Christi is suddenly overwhelmingly busy with this surprise project and hasn’t had the free time she was expecting. We are so thankful it came up while we were here, because we would have had to fly home to deal with it in person we hadn’t already been here. God was smiling on us.

Work continues to go well for Eric.

We spent the weekend with Eric’s parents again. Eric’s sister and all the nieces and nephews on his side who live in Southern California came over, as well, and we had a nice time with the family. We have also seen a few friends. Unfortunately, we aren’t in town for long enough to see everyone. We have only called people we didn’t get in touch with last time, so if you heard from us last time, you won’t hear from us this time.

Eric talked to the people at American Bow Thruster regarding the leak in the port stabilizer. It turns out to be something we can’t fix ourselves. We need to take it in to be worked on. We’re going to work with American Bow Thruster on finding us someone to do the repairs while we are in Europe.

We have been eating out at our favorite restaurants quite a bit. We have especially relished the breakfasts in restaurants here. So far, we haven’t been to a single country that offers the same awesome breakfasts that you can get in America. It seems most countries in the world don’t focus on breakfast, and in the few that do, it just isn’t the same. Christi usually makes breakfast on board, so we are still eating pancakes, waffles and French toast like we did at home, which is why we have not mentioned it before. We have added American style breakfasts to our list of luxuries that Americans take for granted.

Speaking of food, we have been disappointed by the produce in Southern California. Produce in the other countries we have been to tends to taste better than produce does here. For example, in Egypt the cantaloupe was so sweet it was a dessert in and of itself. The cantaloupe we got in San Diego tastes like cardboard. We are sure that the flavorful produce has a lot to do with why we have enjoyed food so much on our travels.

And on a completely random subject”¦ We have long suspected we have an internet gremlin following us around. Every time we get some place with really good internet, we seem to have problems getting it to work. To give a couple recent examples, on our last trip to the US, the internet at the hotel we stayed in died every ten minutes or so. At our marina in Agios Nickolaos, we have a huge boat between us and the wi-fi antenna, and the boat blocks our ability to connect. At the moment, we are staying with friends who normally have an awesome internet connection. We were thrilled about all the things we were going to do on the internet while at their house. Of course, right after we arrived, the internet died. Now we are sure our personal internet gremlin is real.