Hello? Anybody Out There?

Sherry
Jun 4, 2021
3 min read

Well, it is hard to know where to begin when we have not posted a blog since we returned from the Appalachian Trail in the Fall of 2019. It isn't that nothing worthy of writing about has happened--quite the contrary. It may be a bit of laziness on my part for waiting so long to pick it back up. Additionally, it gets to be a bit overwhelming to think about catching up after so much time has passed. My intention is to post a series of blogs over the next few months that highlight some of the bigger events of the last couple years that will get us all caught up before we head back to Mexico (finally after 2 long years away from the boat!).

After arriving home from the rugged struggles of the AT, we were ready just to “be home” for a while and enjoy all its comforts and amenities. While we knew we would miss one season on the water, we never imagined that we would miss a second season on the boat due to a pandemic. We feel quite lucky to live in such a remote area and only go into town every 4 to 6 weeks, therefore the pandemic safety measures didn’t affect our daily life much. Fortunately, we were pretty stocked up on food and toiletries, so the shockingly bare shelves at the grociery store didn’t cause us too much worry; however, the quantity limits on some items made it necessary for us to choose between rationing or more frequent visits to town. We mostly just hunkered down into our self-quarentined life and worked on our projects here at the cabin…mostly.

While we were hiking on the AT my granny had some computer problems and was no longer able to access her email. We talked weekly, but I was not able to share any of our pictures or blog posts from the trail with her. So, one of my first projects was to get her back on email so I could communicate with her daily and share our life with her in pictures. I opened a new Hotmail account for her (not Google because she hates Google—I have no idea why), thinking that if I could have access to her email, I could troubleshoot remotely when she had problems. Once I had it all set up, I called her and tried to guide her through accessing her new email account on her computer—do you have any idea how difficult it is to try to talk someone who is 90 years old and hard of hearing through technology? Well, I do, and it is a good thing I didn’t have any other plans for the day! She wanted to give up several times, but I was persistant (desparate?) to get her into her email. Do you know what the most difficult and time-consuming part was? Since she was opening her email from her computer for the first time, she had to prove she was not a computer by deciphering a CAPTCHA. You know the one where you have to type in a series of letters and numbers that look distorted. I’m not sure if it was the deciphering or the typing that she was doing incorrectly, but I finally had her click the button where it would read to you what you were supposed to type. That was even worse because her hearing wasn’t good enough for her to understand what the computer was saying. We went back to reading it, me afraid each failed try might lock her computer out of her email for good. Eventually our perserverance paid off, and I continue to send her daily messages and pictures to this day.

We spent our first Thanksgiving, our first Christmas and our first Winter at the cabin. While there was ample sunshine, there was lots of cold and lots of snow. We cried “uncle” and decided to go to Mexico for a month. We didn’t plan to put our sailboat in the water (at that time we thought we would be back to the following year). Instead, we rented an Air bnb and decided to take advantage of some of the attractions in San Carlos and Guaymas that we never take time to enjoy in our haste to get on the water.