Is not always sunshine and roses… It sounds so wonderful and in most ways it is. However, it’s not really a vacation because, living on a boat, we still have daily responsibilities like answering email, doing laundry, etc. Depending on where you are, and the weather, it’s sometimes more challenging. We always try to remember how lucky we are to be living this dream, but some tasks are just harder than others – especially in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language. Here are 3 examples, staring with the most trivial.
Coffee – Being very particular about our coffee, and thinking we were so clever, we bought a small Keurig and used valuable luggage space to bring it with us so we wouldn’t have to leave the boat for coffee. One small problem. Our Keurig uses K-cups, but you can’t buy those in France (at least any decent ones). Most of Europe uses the smaller Nespresso cups.
Plan B – Okay, we’ll buy K cups from Amazon. Tried those, but they were awful – more like brown water.
Plan C – buy a small Nespresso from Amazon that works with 110V (We are a 110 V boat (wired primarily for the US, but Europe runs on 220). It came, but had been packaged badly and was broken … Not enough time to order another one before we have to leave.
Plan D– Reusable K cups with ground coffee. So we ordered Starbucks coffee from Amazon, but were surprised when we received coffee beans and not grounds like we expected. Well grinding beans requires a grinder…. But then we’re back to the 110 V limitation…. Unless…. we use the outlet in the marina bathroom. So Anthony bought a cheap grinder from Carrefour and treks to the Marina bathroom late in the evening and spends 20 minutes grinding coffee beans. Tried this with the reusable K cups, but the result was still pretty bad.
Plan E – Back to a simpler approach with an Italian coffee pot that you plop on the stove to steam coffee. Finally a delicious cup of coffee.
Laundry – We decided not to put a washing machine on the boat because it would take up valuable storage space and add weight. In most cases, laundry facilities are nearby marinas. However, doing laundry can be extremely time-consuming, and even more so, when you don’t understand the instructions to use the machines. Do we need to supply our own detergent? Do I need cash, a credit card, or a debit card? How do I set the water temperature, etc.
And when you consider that we are usually walking and carrying our laundry and associated necessities, it’s a royal pain if we’ve forgotten any of the above items. Needless to say, we have misjudged the amount of money we need, forgotten a credit card, not brought enough detergent, etc.
All this assumes that the laundry facility will be open at the posted times. Just this week, thinking I was being efficient…. I wanted to get the laundry started at 8 (when they open), start my walk, come back to move clothes to the dryer, and finish my walk. Great plan! Nope…At 9:10, I was still wandering around the town pulling my little trolley of laundry behind me waiting for the facility to open! We eventually washed our clothes and sheets, but it took most of the morning!
Wifi– One of our biggest challenges has been wireless access. I am still working and internet access is critical for other reasons as well. We knew internet access was important and took several steps to make sure the boat had good wifi…. But the implementation of this has been very frustrating. We worked with an electronics expert (Thomas) who specializes in boat electronics, and he explained the process for setting up wireless on our boat. But the key was that we had to purchase a pre-paid data card for all of this to work. Simple… except that the only way to purchase a pre-paid data plan is from a store that can issue a French phone number to “attach” your account to. Well that doesn’t sound hard, except that the stores one would normally go to for this were closed due to COVID (why cell phone stores were not considered essential business and closed, but chocolate stores were open, is still a mystery). So for the 1st 3 weeks we were here, we had to use our cell phone hot spots. If it hadn’t been the end of the semester for me, with so many long virtual meetings, we might have been fine, but all of the meetings used a lot of data and soon we ran out. Then I resorted to sitting outside the Outremer office and using their wifi, but with the 8 hour time difference this wasn’t feasible at 10:00 pm (time in France – 2:00 pm MT). One of the workers took pity on us and give us what was left on his data card and we blew through that in 48 hours….
I was very stressed, but we met another cruising boat (Patrick and Anja from Anam Cara) and they told us about a Hypermarket nearby where we could buy a pre-paid data card and get a French phone number all at the same time… Hallelujah! Life got so much better (and internet access was so much easier) after that! Little by little we are making progress!
We are making plans for the next leg of the journey – likely a 7-10 day sail to Croatia. Stay tuned for updates!
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