We’ve moved onto the Tartan! (Saturday January 23, 2010)

Okay... how do you get large 8x4 plywood from Home Depot to the boat without a truck? Easy! Carolyne and I took the bus that dropped us off across the street from Home Depot for 6 pesos each. After amazing myself by speaking Spanish and asking for plywood, paint, a plastic coupler and jigsaw blades (pat, pat, pat!), I paid for our space-hog booty and asked the sweet little senorita at the Help Desk if she would call the "Auriga" for us... the red pick up truck taxi service. He arrived five minutes later and for 80 pesos he drove us and all our stuff to the marina.

Since we’re waiting for the engine guy to come and it looks like it might not happen at all, Jim began to work on the bunk bed over the pullman berth... Tim will sleep in the pullman and Carolyne will be atop in the bunk. Jim cut and built the platform for the foam mattress to sit upon. He took a shelf piece (large, wide trim) and affixed it to the side of the bed so it looks like it was manufactured that way... beautiful! I made a pattern of the odd shaped bed out of left over Christmas wrapping paper and headed off on the bus again to the Cortinas Pieles y Tapices store to get foam. I found 3" firm foam for $543 pesos and they cut to specification using my Christmas wrapping paper pattern that I had cut and taped together in the shape and size matched to the bed. They rolled up the foam for me and I got back on the bus with my mattress in tow.

The kids were so excited that we decided today was the day to move onto the Tartan! It’s still a mess with too much left on the boat from the previous owner and too much we really want to keep off of ‘Windfall’, but the time feels appropriate. So, I took a picture of the kids in their beds last night... the fist night living aboard the Tartan. Tim was uncooperative, as usual, for the photo moment... SIGH. I should have let him go fishing and then he would have been more willing to show off with his catch on the ketch! Oh well, I remember being difficult during photos at that age... my mother gave up trying to get me to cooperate!