;-(
My last entry I was all excited about - I'm finally ready to leave on a trip of a life time. Here it is a month later and I'm still in the same place. I mention about how hard it is to leave, but I didn't mention all the things that needed to be done before I could leave. I can glance at my list of things to do and see that I have scratched off 50 items and there are still 50 items on the list. I just gotta quite adding things to the list. But there are some things that just gotta be done.
After retiring I have spent the last 3 years, all my time and all my money and then some rebuilding a 31 year old boat to sail around the world. Then I thought I could get myself ready in 1 - 3 days. What a mistake that was. I considered myself in pretty good health, no major issues that me or my doctors know of. So to keep it that way I wanted to get a few vaccines, thinking I'll go to the doc. one day and I'll be ready to go the next. Since I didn't have any of those childhood disease I had to get a vaccine for all of them along with several others that come highly recommended. Then I found out that it's not just one shot in the arm for this or that, but several needles at different stages. And the window for the 2nd chicken pox shot is narrow, and I still had a few things to do like resupply my first aid kit. One would think that all you would have to do is go to the pharmacy and pick up what you need. Wrong, some supplies for this first aid kit have to be ordered and I'm still waiting on a few things to come in. And being so close to the holidays I might as well stay in Texas and visit my Aunts before I leave.
So I set a date of Mid Jan. after my last shot and I'm outta here no matter what, them doctors can wait. Got Capt. Bill and crew line up for sailing across the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of winter with all the bad weather that happens this time of year. and if the weather is really really bad plan B would be to sail along the gulf coast until I get to Key West and then sail to Mex. Twice the distance and quadruple the time.
While getting all the necessary papers in order to leave the US and enter Mexico I discovered the main one, the Coast Guard vessel Documentation expired at the end of the year. How did I miss this? They didn't send me a renewal notice and the find print says even if they don't send one it's still the boat owners responsibility to renew. I guess I was just too busy with everything else and miss this little detail. After rebuilding the boat last year I change the name and hailing port and addresses, it took at least 6 months to get the papers correct. Now the doc. has expired and it's any body's guess as how long it'll take to renew it. I'm sure it'll be longer then 2 weeks.
So instead of being all excited about leaving soon I'm all pissed off at having to stay in Texas for who knows how long. But on the bright side maybe I can finished those last 50 things on the bucket list.