Sequitur

While winter happened in Patagonia, we had a wonderful four month break back in Canada. Mostly we relaxed in Vancouver, enjoying the superb selection of goods and services, the wonderful fresh produce in the markets, the cleanliness of the environment, the feeling of security, the serenity and peacefulness, the comfort and the ease of life. Had we not spent so much of the past two years making-do in the third world, these simple things would have been taken for granted, or even unobserved, as they likely are by most in Vancouver.


As a part of our relaxing, we fine-tuned the decoration of our loft. Edi applied some oil to the century-old Douglas fir beams, which gave them a great visual pop.


We also added some accent paint on the walls, re-arranged the furniture and re-hung the paintings. Our loft in an old industrial warehouse is now looking very homey.


In August we flew east to visit my family in New Brunswick, and to attend my nephew Andrew's wedding. Sarah, his bride won the battle of alma maters; they were married in the chapel of her Mount Alison University, rather than in his Saint Francis Xavier. It was the first church wedding I have attended since 1959.


My father, now 97 years young, is still grumbling at his driver's license having been taken away last year after he had a mild heart attack. One of the good results of his hospital visit then was that the doctor examined his eyes and told him he could give him vision in his blind eye. Dad was born with sight in only one eye, and he had spent more than 96 years that way. A simple cataract operation last year gave him binocular vision for the first time. He still reads without glasses.


While we were in the East, Edi and I drove across the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island and along to Charlottetown for a feed of steamed mussels and yam chips. We also took a day-drive down to Nova Scotia to visit Peggy's Cove and other communities in that area. We were delighted to see that the area has not been Disney-ized; it still retains its quaint charm.


Esmeralda, the sail-training ship of the Armada de Chile made a visit to Vancouver in August, so we went aboard for a tour. We had last seen her in Talcahuano, Chile in March when we were evacuated out to a deep anchorage in Bahia Concepcion for the arrival of the Japanese tsunami. At that time, Esmeralda had been undergoing a refit in preparation for her current cruise.


We are constantly in awe with the way in which Vancouver has developed, and is continuing to develop. It is such a resident-friendly and visitor-friendly city, with its criss-cross of pedestrian walkways and paths, its many streets that include dedicated bicycle lanes, its waterfront that is nearly all public and accessible, its profusion of parks and green spaces throughout. The city centre is one of the most habitable on the planet.


Vancouver is a very young city; she is celebrating her 125th birthday this year. It is nice to see that the older buildings are being preserved and incorporated into new developments. A good example is the Hotel Georgia, to which a forty-eight story hotel and condo tower was added while fully retaining and restoring the original building. One of the penthouses sold for over $18 million. Just down the street a 59th and 60th floor condo is going for $28 million. Vancouver continues to have a commercial and residential construction boom, while the rest of the world slows, slumps or implodes.


On one of our many walks through the city, we passed the downtown floatplane terminal. This always seemed a very normal facility to us, and as we walked past, four planes took-off and five landed. The frequency of the commuter and charter flights also seemed normal, until we realized that since we sailed south, we have seen no floatplanes; none at all!


In mid-September The Bluewater Cruising Association organized a series of presentations in five western Canadian cities by Nigel Calder, the author of a major cruiser bible: "Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual". We went to two of these in Vancouver, an excellent afternoon seminar on boat DC electrical systems, and a more general evening presentation entitled: "If It Ain't Broke, Just Wait", a very appropriate boating title.

The following evening Edi and I gave a slide presentation to the Vancouver Power and Sail Squadron on the first two years of our cruise. We were slowly easing our way back into boating, meeting old friends from the BCA and VPS.


To keep my foot in the door to my former world as a wine importer, wine writer, wine educator and wine judge, we attended a number of wine tastings. At these we met many old friends, former wine clients and students, but the highlight was Luke Smith. He blames me and some superb Burgundy that I sold him for his having abandoned the corporate world, planted a vineyard and built a winery: Howling Bluff on the Okanagan's Naramata Bench. He is delighted with the move. So are we; his wine is superb.


Rather than offering my standard Sequitur calling card to wine producers and to my former colleagues in the wine business, I designed a new logo for a revamped wine-oriented Sequitur card. This should do us well in the next wine regions we visit, which if things go as planned will be in South Africa.


We had planned our return to Sequitur in Patagonia for the third week of October so that we could help granddaughter Annelies celebrate her first birthday on 14 October. Edi made a dress-up doll from a pattern she had saved for over thirty years from when she had made a similar doll for daughter, Amy. Annelies seemed to be a bit confused with the new kid in the house.


The other grandparents, Bram and Els had come from The Netherlands for the birthday and we had the extended family over for a big roast-beef-and-all-the-trimmings dinner.


Edi baked a birthday cake and we all officially welcomed Annelies into her second year.


With most of the family formalities concluded, we turned our full attention to our preparations for returning to Sequitur in Puerto Montt. When we were in Valparaiso, we had spoken in detail with SAG, the Chilean department responsible for, among other things, agriculture-related importations. We learned that seeds and nuts were admissible only if salted and roasted, that dried fruit was permitted only if seedless, that dairy products were allowed only if pasteurized, and so on. We had found nuts and dried fruit in Chile, but at $35 and more per kilo, we had to find a Vancouver alternative. We bought bulk raw hazelnuts, pecans and almonds, slow-roasted them in the oven, bagged them in heavy poly bags, sprinkled in a 'show' of salt and dressed the packages with creative labels, including nutritional data, barcodes and local names. We weren't being deceitful; the nuts were roasted and salted. We simply needed an easy way to communicate this to Customs and SAG.


Through the summer we had been accumulating things to bring back with us to Sequitur. Things which are unavailable, of poor quality, or way overpriced in Chile, like coffee beans, chocolate, and rice crackers, to name only a few. Things like additional tools, replacements for items that had broken, and fresh spares to replace spares that had been used. Two days before our scheduled flight, I began packing the accumulated piles into the four checked bags and four carry-on bags we were allowed. Fortunately our flight was a few days before Air Canada's change from two 23k pieces of checked baggage per person to only one. Even so, there was no way we could get it all into the allowed eight pieces; we needed a ninth, and this would incur excess baggage charges of $225.

We were now we were faced with the problem of getting five pieces of checked baggage onto our LAN Chile connection from Santiago to Puerto Montt, which allows only two. We could have inter-lined the four pieces without much hassle, but the fifth was up in the air... or maybe not! We decided to book a rental car and drive the 1000 kilometres to Puerto Montt. With the car reserved for three days, we cancelled the flight for a full refund of the $750 fare. The car at just under $500 with drop-off fees, plus gas, freeway tolls and hotel will total about the same as the flight, and give us a car for errands on arrival in Puerto Montt.


On Tuesday evening, the day before our flight, we walked over to Amy and Bram’s for a family get-together and farewell. Then we went back to the loft to continue our packing. By late on Tuesday evening I had managed to juggle fragile and tough, bulky and small, heavy and light, soft and hard items into five suitcases; four of them at exactly 50.5 pounds and one excess bag at 70.5 pounds on our scale. This took full advantage of the 23 and 32 kilo limits. I hoped the airport's scale agreed. Our four carry-on bags were limited to 10 kilos each, but they weighed a total of 75 kilos; way over weight, and this wasn't counting Edi's very heavy purse. Fortunately the pieces were dense, undersized, and inconspicuous. We hoped they would be ignored.


On Wednesday morning the 19th of October we juggled our nine pieces of luggage aboard the Sky-Train, needing to jamb the door only for the last piece. The checked baggage weights were on-the-nose, and we breezed through the check-in process with our pre-printed boarding cards. Our carry-on pieces looked innocent and were not weighed. Boarding in Toronto for the continuation to Chile went smoothly, and we were pleased to see all five checked pieces on the conveyor in Santiago at noon on Thursday.

All of our bags were x-rayed as we passed through the Customs screening, and agents asked to examine four of the pieces. We were able to easily explain the roasted and salted nuts, the many kilos of Asiago and other cheeses, but things ground to a halt when one of the agents pulled-out a bag with four propellor shaft zincs. It took a while and another agent to finally relieve her mind that these unfamiliar objects were not contraband. We were released, and wheeled our more than 200 kilos of loot to the rental car.


We had reserved a standard-sized sedan, but there were none available, so we were given a Nissan X-Trail, into which the baggage just fit in one layer with the seats folded down. We paused for the night in Los Angeles, about mid-way along our route to Puerto Montt. We arrived back at Sequitur in the yard at Club Nautico Reloncavi in Puerto Montt at 1630 on Friday the 21st.


We moved our bags aboard, unpacked and began the slow process of waking-up Sequitur from her winter slumber and getting her ready to carry us onward. To begin with we are camping onboard with few creature comforts; nonetheless, it is good to be home again.