Happy New Year!

January 1st, 2007 is our four year anniversary of living aboard Radiance.

Our first New Years Day living aboard was quite memorable...

Toward the end of December 2002, we moved out of our apartment, moved most of our things into storage, provisioned the boat with a few necessities, and caught a plane to Denmark to spend Christmas with Steen's family. It was also my inaugural trip to Denmark to meet Steen's brother, sister-in-law and niece, grandmother, uncles, aunts, God-parents, and all his close friends. Needless to say I was...'excited', (read 'stressed').

So, we made it to Denmark and had a truly fairy tale holiday.
There were candles in the windows, babies bundled up in their prams, hearts everywhere (a Christmas symbol in Denmark), the air was crisp and clear, and the houses seemed to glow with warm light through the nights and the short winter days.

Since I was the wife of a native Dane, and welcomed into the homes of Steen's friends and family, I was treated to an 'inside experience' of Denmark that few visitors have. There were so many wonderful moments - too many to mention, but a few of them stand out:

-rising just before dawn and bicycling over the frost to the local bakery for 'tebirkes' and 'alpe broed' (unbelievably good pastries and bread, unlike any I had ever tasted). 'Tak' to Jorgen for that.

-sitting at the lunch and dinner table of my in-laws, Per and Annemarie. A visitor to Denmark would find no better meals than those we shared at their table. I felt like we must be staying at the finest of chateaux.
Per and Annemarie served so many special meals, that I took pictures of most of them...(on film).

They are experts at making their own pate's, their own mustards, and jams, their own sild, (pickled herring mixed with sauces like curry, or orange, or red onions),... and sylte, (a type of herbed, spiced pork molded into a loaf to be sliced at lunch and served on their own pumpernickel bread). The sylte was eaten with homemade mustard and homemade pickled beets. All the ingredients were the freshest to be found. The herring was from the fjord just 300 yards from their house.

And those were just items on the lunch menu. Dinner was an equally impressive display, sometimes followed with a 30 year old homemade schnapps, one of Per's specialties.

-watching home movies of the family's years living in Greenland, and talking with Uncle Niels Jorgen about his around-the-world trip he took with a friend in the late 50's, biking, hiking, and riding trains across the U.S, Europe, the Middle East, India and the Far East. A fascinating fellow.

-visiting Steen's brother and family in the country, at their beautiful and innovative, environmentally friendly home they researched and built themselves.

-having Steen's 90 year old grandmother make us her signature dish, 'fake turtle', (not really turtle...veal actually, served in a sherry sauce).

-visiting with Steen's gracious God-parents and their family, and being treated like royalty, served champagne and the finest of cheeses, and leg of lamb for dinner.

-taking a bicycle tour of Copenhagen, and Christmas shopping along the 'Stroget', a famous pedestrian street in the city.

-and just generally living in a fairy tale for two whole weeks.
Our plane was to depart on New Year's Day, so the morning after spending a wonderful Eve with all of Steen's old friends, we packed up and headed for the airport...and Tacoma, and the boat.

We touched down at about 5:00 pm and took a shuttle to retrieve our car from the parking lot valets. Tacoma had at least a foot of snow, and the cars all looked alike. Somehow, the attendants had lost our car, or lost our keys...something like that - it took a LONG time to get our car back.

We finally got back to the marina, jet-lagged and hungry and climbed aboard our new home. Our neighbor had forgotten to turn the heat on for us that day so the boat was pretty chilly.

I think we ate something and then crashed early. Sometime during the night, the winds picked up and the boat swayed a little from side to side. We listened, but everything seemed all right, so we fell back to sleep. Sometime later we both opened our eyes to sound of high winds and a distinct rubbing...ah oh.

We jumped out of bed and out on deck to find that Radiance had come untied on one end and was rubbing against the boat next door. With the wind blowing and us in our bare feet and t-shirts, we jumped off and began pulling Radiance back to the dock. 'What a homecoming!', we thought. We surveyed the situation; the boats were fine - we cleated her off more securely and climbed back aboard. Our 2003 had started off with a bang.