Never Give Up and Happy Birthday Tom!!

Tom had a great birthday this year, February 11, 2014...

1) The perfect birthday present, back in La Paz after 7 months in California.

After a few weeks of tying up loose ends, a few days of insanely mad packing/storing/selling/donating/trashing, and missing our flight (but getting on another one shortly thereafter), we arrived in Cabo San Lucas. We had a lively, 3 hour bus ride from Cabo to La Paz and arrived late, exhausted, with a cold six-pack in hand, a warm evening, and a comfortable, clean boat at the end. We could finally relax!!

2) Tom's best pal Jay called him from Massachusetts, they had a great conversation and it put Tom in a terrific mood.

3) We went to Tom's favorite place, Harker Board, for dinner and the best beer in town from Baja Brewing Company.

Tom enjoys a cold microwbrew (rare in Baja) on Harker Board's new upstairs patio. 

4) We were joined by our bay area friend Rob, so we were officially a Birthday Party. (Rob sailed down to Mexico last November on his boat Tiger Beetle and we have been drooling over his blog posts ever since.) We ate loads of food, drank a lot of beer (it was 2 for 1 night), watched the sun set and the moon rise. 

We rendezvous with Rob from Tiger Beetle

A lot of you know it seemed to take us forever to get back down here. It was an incredibly busy summer jam-packed with some fun activities and some difficult ones. Maybe we will do a post on "What We Did During Our Summer Vacation".  

As we were sorting through our last boxes of junk, pulling an all-nighter of packing in what seemed a vain attempt to catch our scheduled flight, I came across a cartoon that our friend Stan had given to me before I raced to Hawaii in 2004 with my friend Synthia. It gave us renewed vigor...

Thanks Stan. Words to live by.

We made it Tom! Happy Birthday!!

Hasta Luego La Paz! Returning to the Rat Race.

We've been in La Paz almost two weeks getting Cinnabar decommissioned and prepped for spending hurricane season here at Marina Palmira. We've contracted boat managers to keep an eye on our baby, met with a watermaker expert who helped us fix a leak in our watermaker, contracted Hector the canvas guy to make a boat cover for us, hired Chava and crew to polish Cinnabar's hull, topsides and metal, hooked up with a refrigeration expert (another Hector) who inspected and recharged our system, hired Luis the diver to regularly clean Cinnabar's hull, and so on and so forth.

We've been having fun* pickling the watermaker, pickling the heads, cleaning the boat, removing the sails, servicing and storing the dinghy and outboard, cleaning out the freezer and refrigerator, setting out roach hotels, and a ton of other things that are...wait a minute you say, back up, ROACH HOTELS??? Well yes, we bought them entirely as a preventative measure. However...HOWEVER...Tom spied an, er, "insect" in our cockpit this afternoon. GAH!!!!! We think we drowned the sucker, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's doing the backstroke around the boat right now waiting for us to turn our heads. But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah...setting out ahem-cough-cough hotels and a ton of other things that are making me exhausted just thinking about them. Not to mention that every time we start a task it leads to some other extensive "fix" that we didn't plan on that seems to take all day! Boat owners will know exactly what I'm talking about. Let's see, it takes two weeks to get Cinnabar ready for hurricane season, we could probably sail home in two weeks...nah, I don't even want to go there!

*lie

In between the boat chores we've been making regular visits to Harker Board Co, a crazy combo of Stand Up Paddleboard  (SUP) rental by day and restaurant/pub by afternoon/evening. It's our new favorite spot by virtue of the fact that they sell all the beers from Baja Brewing Company. We love the ambience and the staff...

Beer goddess Nancy keeps Tom's growler filled.

...and it's located right on the malecon for maximum people watching effect. It's owned by a gringo, but the regulars seem to be locals. They even have a TV outside for sports fans and we enjoyed watching the NBA finals there amidst a large group of basketball aficionados.

As you can see, Tom patronizes Harker for THE BEER.

We've managed to fit in three mini birthday parties, two for people who aren't even here! (Any excuse to drink, heh. Oops, did I say that out loud?)



We did actually have a live birthday girl on Cinnabar one afternoon, so we had an impromptu celebration complete with a bottle of champagne, the last bottle in our inventory.



Birthday girl Nancy from Shindig. Those bad boys are giving up her age.

We are trying like mad to drink all our wine and beer and eat the last of our perishable food. I can't seem to get rid of one big jar of mayo, a giant jar of peanut butter and one pound of butter. How did we end up with all that fat? Oh, and there's that big block of cream cheese too.

It's getting hot as Hades here in La Paz, but the evenings are sublime. Three nights ago we enjoyed cocktails on a neighbor's boat, Victory, and watched the Supermoon rise in the East. It was an amazing sight.

This picture does NOT do that moon justice.

Yesterday the weather seemed to get humid and much hotter. All the locals say it's finally beginning to feel like summer, which means HOT HOT HOT! We are obsessed with keeping hydrated with cool drinks. Tom was particularly impressed with Nancy's ice sticks...

...so impressed that he was compelled to make some of his own, which were, how shall I say it delicately, obscenely huge!

Impressive girth there Tom.

It's hard to believe that by tomorrow afternoon we will be back in California. It will be 100 degrees in La Paz and 84 degrees in Mountain View. At the moment, drenched in our own condensation, 84 degrees sounds mighty nice, but I'll bet as soon as we get home we'll be kvetching about the cold.

A few more pics of our last couple of weeks in La Paz are HERE. It's kind of sad that we haven't had a chance to do more sightseeing, sigh. Maybe when we return in the fall.

To see our entire ~2600 nautical mile, 6 month route on a map, click onto the "Cinnabar Sails" link under the map on the sidebar.