Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Rx: Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Brownies

Once again our cruise is stalled by a maintenance issue. Crap! The inverter has gone belly-up and our cruising is delayed until we can replace it. A new one will be here (in Falmouth Mass on south shore of Cape Cod) by noon tomorrow and should be installed by end of day.

We cruised from Falmouth to Hyannis on Monday with plans to go to Nantucket and then to Martha's Vineyard this week. We walked the town and to the JFK Memorial built by the people of Hyannis. It was a lovely park setting overlooking the beach and another mooring field in the Hyannis Harbor. Here's Vicki overlooking the harbor. And on the right, Norm in front of the fountain. We understand that Ted was staying at the Hyannis compound but we did not see him. We also understand that his 50ft sail boat is moored in the same place we are, but we did not see it either. We were hoping he would be on his boat and we would swing by in the dinghy and get invited up for afternoon tea, but no luck.


Monday night Norm noticed that the inverter wasn't working and smelled an electrical burning odor at the inverter. Not good! He did all the troubleshooting and nothing worked. We called around and decided the best place to go for installation was a boatyard in Falmouth. So, back to Falmouth we went on Tuesday.

Norm ordered a new inverter from Bob Campbell, the electrical guru in Annapolis, who was already working on a proposal for our boat to make some modifications to the electrical system. He has worked on several other boats like ours and was able to quickly recommend the inverter that would be best for us and had it shipped to us.

Resilience seems to be a key ingredient for successful cruising. It's important to bounce back when things go wrong or don't go as expected. In that vein, we decided to have some fun this morning and took the Shining Sea bike path to Woods Hole to the Pie in the Sky bakery and had what had been described to us as “amazing” pecan rolls (and they were). You can see our transportation in the picture on the left. (You thought you'd get a picture of the pecan rolls, didn't you?) Then we toured the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute exhibit. We learned all about how they discovered the Titanic, and the amazing research submersible “Alvin” that explores 3 miles down. Fascinating.

Our resilience was also aided by making the Ghirardelli double chocolate brownies that Robin had given us the mix for. There's nothing like a chocolate stupor to make you forget your troubles!

Let’s hope the inverter arrives on time tomorrow and the installation goes smoothly. We plan to go to Martha’s Vineyard on Friday. If something prevents that....well, we have brownies in reserve!

Happy Birthday to Vicki's Dad. He's one of our most faithful readers and we love chatting with him about our cruise.

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