Sail the sea with The Merry Lee

Hola Amigos, While many of our friends and family have felt like it has been a couple of years since we left MDR, in reality we left dock 6 months ago and have been south of the border only 5 months.

We are heading back to LA/OC/SD for a short visit to make sure that our grandchildren still remember us, to take care of some business (Taxes) and to find Mary Lee Chinese food. We thought this would be a good time for some reflection.

We have had a marvelous time here. We have told you before that it is the people that you meet while traveling that make your trip special. What surprised us was that it was the People of Mexico that made our trip special. The People are kind, gentle, helpful, honest, hardworking and sincere. Everyday we were victims of random acts of kindness.

The most pleasant revelation was "THE FOOD". Produce is fresh, delicious and cheap.
Every region has their own specialty. We will need to look up references on regional Mexican specialties so we can appreciate their faire. Try as we may, we never had a bad meal here. We went from French, German, Italian restaurants to hole-in-the-wall taco stands with little change in quality and with a little more change in our purse from the latter. Mary Lee is wondering why Chinese restaurants are nonexistent on the coast of Mexico.

In addition, the water and ice is purified. We did get "Tourista" here once but we usually got "Santa Monicaista" every 6 months. Because we were in a relatively closed environment, we missed out on our usual 2 to 4 to 6 weeks of colds and flu's. You don't get sick pay when you are retired so staying well is a double bonus.

The Merry Lee has lived up to her name. The boat systems have gone along Merrily. The water maker fills our tanks with purified water for drinking and showering. The solar panels are pumping out up to 25 Amps an hour (outstanding). Our dingy davits, dingy, and dingy engine have performed as expected. It is our humble opinion that when we go into marinas that the Merry Lee is frequently given the "A" berth where she is highly visible. Marinas like to accessorize well.

When we return to La Paz in 2 weeks we will cruise the Sea of Cortez for 3 weeks. Mary Lee will fly home May 6th and Lewis will bring our boat home with 2 other crew. Our insurance dictates that we get north of the border before June 1st to avoid hurricanes. We guess insurance companies and hurricanes look at different schedules and don't communicate well.

We are planning on returning to Mexico next cruising season to revisit favorite anchorages, explore missed ones, and to visit some additional mainland destinations (Copper Canyon for starters). We would love to have some of our friends share this beautiful country with us and give them an opportunity to improve their/our Spanish.



We are working diligently on our Spanish. We have "Buenos dias and cerveza" down but we had that down before we left so maybe next year we will try to improve our Spanish.
What a wonderful excuse to come down here next year.

Happy Vaya con Dios until we Blog again

Mary Lee and Lewis