Category Archives: Information

Information we discovered during our travels.

Outfitting Kosmos For a Baby — Feeding, Diapering and Bathing

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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 →

Yellowstone to Jackson

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This post covers the late afternoon of Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming to Jackson, Wyoming. You can read about the activities we did in the morning here and the activities we did in the early afternoon 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.

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Outfitting Kosmos For a Baby — Bassinet, Stroller and Car Seat

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We know there are a few readers who are in our age group that will probably have kids soon, as well as many blog readers who are anticipating grandkids in the near future. So, for those of you, we’re starting a series on baby stuff. If you don’t fit the baby demographic, fear not! We promise the blog will still focus primarily on boating and travel, not on babies. But in order continue our boating/traveling lifestyle with our new crew member, we do have to outfit the boat properly.

Needless to say, which such limited room onboard, we need relatively small items that are easy to secure and/or stow away. We also want the gear to be lightweight so it is easy to get on and off the boat.

Our first concern was a place for the baby to sleep. Nowadays, the “experts” advise parents that the baby should sleep in the same room as mom and dad for the first 3 – 4 months, but not in mom and dad’s bed. Conveniently enough, we found the Fisher-Price Newborn Rock N Play Sleeper, which is a folding bassinet that fits in the small space between Christi’s side of the bed and the wall. What was even more exciting about this bassinet is that it is angled, which makes it easier for babies to sleep when they are suffering from indigestion or stuffy noses. It also rocks forward and back, which babies supposedly find more soothing than side to side motion. And, it is “bouncy,” so it jiggles slightly every time the baby moves and/or takes little effort for parents to jiggle it. Babies supposedly like the jiggling motion. When Christi was doing research, she was amazed by the rave reviews — there were over 600 reviews on Amazon and most of them were 5 stars! The plan is to set the bassinet up at bed time, then fold it away in the morning.

Last time we took Kosmos out, we Continue reading →

Occupy Oakland Riots

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The Occupy Wall Street Movement started on September 17, 2011. While the movement was centered in New York City, many other cities around the country started similar movements at the same time. San Francisco’s Occupy Movement was centered in the Financial District near the Ferry Terminal, first at a Bank of America, then at the Federal Reserve Building. Christi often walked by the protestors on her way to her favorite Internet cafe.

Christi worked in the banking world from 1996 to 2007. In 2002, Christi became deeply troubled by the economic policies set by the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As time went on, she became more troubled as the policies she viewed unfavorably were expanded. She wanted to join in the San Francisco protest, particularly once they moved to the Federal Reserve Building. Unfortunately, the peaceful protesters were harassed by police from the beginning. Eric made Christi promise never to go into the protest area because it wasn’t safe for a pregnant woman, particularly one who wasn’t yet showing.

After we moved Kosmos to Oakland, we saw that there was an Occupy Oakland protest set up in the park in front of City Hall, in the heart of downtown. Since it was across the street from the BART (train) station, we passed it often. Eric never went over to that side of the street to get a closer look, but Christi did several times.

In keeping her promise to Eric, she never actually went into the park, but she lingered around the sidewalk nearby and talked to some of the people that worked in the shops adjoining the park. There were a few more times she intended to stop by the park that she didn’t, though, because there was police wearing riot gear surrounding the park.

The more Christi talked to the locals, the clearer it became that this movement was different from the other Occupy Movements around the country. Instead of expressing anger about federal policies that have exacerbated income inequality, Oakland was more focused on Continue reading →

Exploring Oakland, California

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We knew that every Sunday morning there was a Farmer’s Market at Jack London Square. But when Sunday morning rolled around, we almost fell over from shock when we walked upstairs shortly after waking up to see this:

The booths were so close to Kosmos that we could have stood on the bow and stolen produce from the stands! Here is a shot from the other direction:

Having the Farmer’s Market come to us made shopping easy! It was an especially good market, too. We knew we’d miss it when we were gone.

We did a little exploring of downtown Oakland in the month we had Kosmos there. Oakland was officially made a town in 1852, the same time the shipping industry began on Oakland’s shores.  Oakland was prosperous from the beginning. In addition to the shipping wharves, Oakland became the main staging post for passengers and cargo journeying between the Bay Area and the Sierra foothills during the California Gold Rush. In the 1860s a railroad hub was put into Oakland and the town boomed even more, with shipbuilders, automobile manufacturing, canneries and many more industries developing there. Oakland’s history is rich with fascinating information, but we’re not going to get into the details in this post.

As we walked around downtown Oakland, we noticed that most of the buildings looked to be from the late 1800s to early 1900s. It was clear from the architecture, the quality of construction and the appointments that this was once a very wealthy city, and that it was beautiful in its heyday. Here are a couple of examples:

Oakland continued to flourish until World War II. During the war, an influx of Continue reading →