To Laugh...or to Cry?
05 March 2009 | Bonaire
Louis woke up this morning up eager to get word of our part. He looked around for the cell phone and, having no luck, nudged me awake. "Do you know where the phone is", he asks, a bit of tension in his voice. I grumpily tell him I have no idea, more concerned with finding a cup of coffee than the cell phone. But, as I adjust to a state of awakeness, I realized that, as Louis suspected, I had left the phone at the video store the night before. And they don't open until 4:30 this afternon. Ooops. The word "pendejo" comes to mind! (Other words come to Louis' mind, no doubt!)
The rest of the day is a cacophony of mishaps: we place a call from the boat via our computer to Eric, the hydraulic guy, but we're cut off mid-call due to Skype's bad connection. Then the computer crashes. Meanwhile, minutes on our internet card tick away. The computer slowly re-boots, but the card is now expired! We head to town to see if we can get the part locally; alas, the parts store is closed for lunch. We can't reach Eric, so we place a call from town to a neighboring island to order the part from there. They can't hear me well enough to take down the info, and their internet is down so I can't email them the order. With the fedex deadline minutes away, I sprint down the waterfront to use the internet-phone service on the other side of town and place the order...let's hope it's in time.
We try to send an email to Erik so he doesn't order a duplicate part, but realize his email address is back on the boat. So....back to boat to call Erik using our phone card. Ooops...we forgot to close the hatches when we left. It rained into the boat and, of course, the phone cards are sitting in one of the 2 spots that got wet. Bummer. Wouldn't you know it - scratch off codes don't scratch off when they're wet! Luckily we bought more internet cards when we were in town, so we reach Erik via Skype and let him know the part is ordered.
Thinking our crap-o day is behind us, we go for a swim and then into town for a drink and dinner. On the way to town, the submerged line of a fishing boat gets caught in the prop of the dinghy. Louis untangles the line, but when we get to the dock it starts to rain. We realize we forgot to close the hatches (again!...Pendejos!), so, it's back to the boat to close the hatches. After dinner on shore I go to the video store because, while there was someone there this afternoon who kindly gave me our cell phone back, they weren't techincally "open" yet, so they couldn't take the video back. Go figure. Anyway, I walk to the video store, but, you guessed it - now they're closed and I'll owe a late fee. I think this "sorry, we're closed and have no drop box" policy is the key to their profitability!
To complete our wonderful day, when we get back to the boat I try to connect to the internet to finish some business from this afternoon. But the 6-hour internet card we just purchased has now expired with only 20 minutes of use.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.
Now we know why cruisers drink so much...and here we thought it was because they had so much leisure time!