I got back to the hotel lobby at 7am and the rest of the family was already seated to eat breakfast. There wasn’t much of a choice: donuts, toast, Raisin bran and Fruit Loops, orange juice, apple juice, coffee and tea. I had two small bowls of Raisin bran. I wasn't expecting it to last long.
We all sat at a small round table built for two, squeezed in together and made small talk. It turns out that we all met our partners on-line in some form.
“The cybersex was the best I’ve ever had!” I exclaimed, getting the group to chuckle.
We drove to the Wahweap Marina shortly thereafter, in two vans. Mom and Bill got the paperwork ready while Iris and I chatted with Marcela at the pier. Everyone else was at the boat, too.
We asked Marcela all the questions and she willingly answered. She and Jason met on-line three years ago on Yahoo! She left Romania to work as an au-pair girl in Germany, where she picked up the language rather fast. Her mother is an alcoholic and she has seven other siblings. Her German isn’t perfect and neither is her English, but she can communicate in either language, sometimes switching words from one to another if she doesn’t know a particular meaning. I had no trouble understanding her.
Our luggage was loaded on for us by the marina employees: Lucasz from Poland drove the luggage cart, Garth from South Africa gave the captain and skipper boating instructions. There was a lot of inspecting to do before we could leave. The boat across from us had a two-year-old German Shepherd Dog on board, and another man, from Boston and now living in Carmel, IN, chatted with Kevin for a bit. It seemed like we would never leave the marina.
Our houseboat rental was M22 Myacht, a 53-footer with four cabins and room to sleep 12. We had a TV and DVD player, a stove, two small refrigerators and two toilet-shower stalls.
We finally left the marina at 9:20am, only to get confused as to what was the main channel. The red and green buoys were hard to see in the sun.
The three stacks of the Navajo Power Plant never left us. Rocks around us were red rock sandstone from the Protorozoic and Paleozoic era, 1.7 billion years ago, from the Colorado Plateau. It was hard to see the buoys on the river as in the distance all we could see were rocks.
Mom, Iris and I chatted upstairs on the upper deck for a while and never noticed we were going the wrong way. We were in Last Chance Canyon, a riverway with no way out. We were floating in a northwesterly direction when we needed to go northeast.
We made a long U-turn before we settled on a compass direction of South, then North and finally a gradual Northeast before ankering in Padre Bay for the afternoon. Alex and Mom kayaked, Kevin snorkeled, I walked around in vain looking for crinoids and took lots of good photographs. Dinner was chicken breasts with rice mix and lots of tortilla chips. Everyone went around and chatted in groups for a few minutes.
Our bunk was upstairs with Mom’s but it was closest to the generator which blasted long after we went to bed. We could hear the water pump activate everytime someone flushed the toilet.
At night I couldn’t sleep too well as I felt congested and it turned out that everyone else was congested and overheated as well. I didn’t do too much today but was tired nonetheless. Hopefully tomorrow would be more active.
No comments:
Post a Comment