Exhausted

It’s now a whole week that we’ve been in San Francisco, well technically Sausalito, which is nicely north of the city and generally sunny when the town is in fog (we’re told). We don’t quite feel like locals yet, but we’re getting there. We’ve met a bunch of people with nice American names; Chuck, Joe, Terry, Cesar, Delores, Brett. We’ve got phone numbers that start with 415. We know the difference between Mollie Stone’s and Trader Joe’s, we know what you can buy at Best Buy and Dollar Tree. We’ve had breakfast at a Mexican-American diner just around the corner. We’ve not yet had a burger though…

It’s been a hectic week, getting everything sorted out. A stack of things have been knocked off the todo list, the boat is all ship shape and running just fine on the domestic side of things, and I’m starting back at work tomorrow.

We’ve moved the boat to slip 1000, which is right next to the main walkway (inside the gated marina) – handy but not so private. It’s a good spot to meet people though, catching folk as they go by. We catch the wind, too – it’s the westernmost slip in the marina, which means the wind whistling off the Marin headlands hits us first. The other night we put our new cooker to the test on it’s gimbals; the boat was over ten degrees on the dock! They say it gets windier sometimes too. Whoopee. We might look to move to another slip at some point.

The marina showers are hot and powerful (I’ve fixed the one on board but it doesn’t really compare), and the toilet block is clean – though the heads on board works great and we get the holding tank pumped out every other week, so no drama there. It gets a little chilly at night when the sky is clear, so we’ve ordered a new electric heater which we’ll stick on a timer to warm the boat up before we get up in the morning. The on board fridge is running just fine, if a little noisy at night, and the water heater gets a nice lot of washing water ready in a few minutes when we need it. The new cooker (thanks mum and dad!) is amazing; we’ve not yet used the oven in anger but I can see it’s going to do the trick. After wondering what to do with the old one for a few days, I left it outside the marina gate and when I got back from the shower it had gone! Job done. Hope it went to a good cause and not the land fill.

We put our bikes together and had a short pedal up the way to the coffee place next to Proof Lab surf shop. We made an epic, traffic heavy, late night trip to Ikea and Home Depot, and bought a load of stuff including a set of DeWALT power tools – Man Toys. Grr. We’ve put pictures up and taken a door down between the main cabin and the front cabin. It was just getting in the way. We’ll get a curtain up there instead. I fixed the shower pump that wasn’t working, removed all the old 1980s Decca navigation equipment, and applied for an MMSI number for the VHF radio (it’s like a boat signature, so that if, god forbid, we have to hit the emergency DSC mayday button, the coastguard know everything about the boat immediately). We sat in the Social Security office for me to get a number so I’m on the books. We opened a bank account this morning with the Bank of America – not something we’d planned to do, but I needed to cash a load of travellers cheques and they’d only do $500 at once for non account holders. Now I have one for work to pay my wages into which will be handy.

Both of us are exhausted, with everything around us being a new experience, there’s a lot to take on board every minute of the day. We just got back from a drive south to Half Moon Bay to pick up a new van (more about that later) – which left us both shattered. It’s not hard driving, just new. Eyes out on stalks all the time. Bring it on.