New Years Eve Russ and I took the fur kids and caught the bus with Marcia and went to Kinder Meats where I got two rib eye steaks, two smoked pork chops and some pastrami, roast beef lunch meats. Now the lunch meat is truly a treat because all the lunch meat here is ham or ham based. You are hard pressed to find roast beef in the grocery store. They do have pretty good ham. Marcia took our meat back to her boat so we could continue on to Mega to return a dvd player that I got the day before. It did not play US store bought DVD's. You have to watch that. All the US is country code 1 and Mexico is country code 4 so if you buy a device with a country code of 4 there is a good chance that it will not play the country code 1 DVD's and vice versa. After that we walked over to the La Gran Plaza to see if they had a computer store. No real computer store, however eighty percent of the mall were shoe stores. Amelda Marcos has nothing on them down here. I am realizing that the women here live for shoes. Out of all the shoes stores there was only one that I saw that had a large variety from flats to high hills. The other stores only carried high hills. My back hurts just looking at them. We took a taxi down to the Ley's grocery store in the historic district. This Ley's is the very first Ley's in Mazatlan. We were looking for a natural health store which we were told is directly across the street from Ley's. Well we did not find it but we did find a DVD player that has the country code of one. So now we have a back up for the one we have that are showing signs of misbehaving.

Now it is time to drop the dingy and head over to Juniata's. The four of us are heading up to their friends condo that is here in the marina. John and Gay are great hosts. They have done a lot of traveling by boat to Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Galapagos and the Pacific Northwest. They own a restaurant called "Toby's" on Whidbey Island. We (Juniata & us) were asked to bring a side dish and a vegetable. What we did take was the requested items and the before dinner happy hour snacks and a bottle of wine. The food consisted of the following:

Happy Hour Snacks:
Brie Cheese with salami (really good Brie and Salami),
Cream Cheese with Crab and Cocktail Sauce with Milton's French Onion crackers, Vegetable tray.

Dinner:
Steak Tenderloin about 1 ½ in thick and 4 inches in diameter cooked to perfection.
Cauliflower casserole (which was excellent)
Steamed Broccoli

We started the evening with Gin Tonics and at dinner red wine and champagne to toast the New Year in. Watched fire works from the balcony. What a wonder night. It was time to say good night and we walked back to Juniata's boat and retrieved our meat and dinghy back to the boat it now is 1:40 am January 1, 2010.

We will leave from here on January 3rd to head south to San Blas. This leg should take about twenty four hours. I am sad to leave Juanita behind. We were hoping to travel with them. If they do not catch up with us we will see them again back in Mazatlan on our return trip back up the sea. The next few days will be filled with last load of laundry, getting fuel and mandatory stuff that gets put off.

The photo is the view from the balcony looking across the harbor.