We are pleased to announce our son, Keith Frederick Grab, was born on March 16, 2012! Weight 3110 grams (6 pounds 13 ounces) and 48 cm (19 inches) long. Mother and baby are doing well.
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.
Our new little crew member is due in only 5 days! Given the limitations onboard, we can’t go crazy with lots of baby products. We’ve carefully chosen a few key items that we think will meet the baby’s needs, yet work well with Kosmos’s space limitations. We’ve already covered the sleeping arrangements in another post. The other basic needs are feeding, diapering and bathing. Here is what we have done:
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, Continue reading
This post covers the early afternoon of Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. You can read about the activities we did in the morning here.
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, Continue reading
A couple months ago, we mentioned that World Footprints Media was running a Best Photo Contest called “I LOVE To Travel.” One of the prizes was a copy of both our books. In our last update, we forgot to mention that the winner of our books was Sarah S. of Pennsylvania. Congrats to Sarah!
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 Continue reading
As we mentioned in our last post a few days ago, we are finally going to finish the Passage Across America series about our trip across the USA and back. The last post we put up in the thread covered Keystone, South Dakota to Yellowstone National Park (which is located mostly in Wyoming, with a little bit in Montana and Idaho, as well). Since that post only contained pictures, in this post, we’ll fill in some of the story.
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 Continue reading