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June 8, 2001
And my turn comes around again-though it has been an unusually long time
coming-and so I must write this e-mail, though I don't feel quite in the mood to
do it, and at present I can't think of very much to write about.
We are at present in Bahia Redonda, one of the many marinas-it seems, at least,
that there are dozens-in Puerta la Cruz, Venezuela. The place seems to be made
mainly-or at least the parts that I have seen-marinas, their attachments and
grounds, and the mall, which is three miles from Redonda, through a circuitous,
winding, long, rough dinghy ride through the masses of hotels etc. The mall
itself, Plaza Mayor, is quite nice, though it doesn't have much that I want.
Still, there's a supermarket and a cheap Internet place, which is good for
contacting Dad.
I suppose you know about Dad going, from other e-mails-but I'll explain anyway.
He's gone to Colorado again, left on the 31st, to give a presentation that he's
been working on for some time. He returns tomorrow, on Bronwen's birthday. Of
course, we've loaded him with things to do-shopping, and picking up schoolbooks,
and so on. So we've been e-mailing him now, from the Internet café.
Our last major place was Margarita, Venezuela, which I'm sure Mom wrote about in
her e-mail, so there's no use in my writing anything about that. But we
island-hopped to here from there, taking about a week to do it. Most of our
anchorages on the way were quiet, rather windless bays that we occasionally
snorkeled in. The snorkeling was particularly good; we saw quite a few fish, and
the odd, spring-shaped, tapering colored coral thingies sticking out of hard
coral. I'm not exactly sure what they were, but they looked very pretty and
delicate, waving in the current, and came in all sorts of colors ranging from
white through delicate pink to dark blue, all shades on one piece of coral. We
call them "Christmas Trees"-I don't think that is a formal name for it-as they
have that sort of shape, though coiled up like a spring.
It's fairly nice here, too. We have a pool, with warm water (so warm, sadly,
that you're too hot in the afternoon and morning, and the three-foot-deep
kiddy-pool is almost like a hot tub) and a rather interesting layout, a
ping-pong table that has neither net, balls nor paddles (as you might think,
this is not considered one of the major advantages), bathrooms that have no
ventilation (ditto, but nice for showers, so the others say), water and
electricity on hose, and fairly good docks. The Hoptoads also came shortly after
Dad left, and they docked beside us, so that was fun. Sonny was useful in
several wastes of his time, one being the lengthy search for a loose connection
(the inverter didn't work) or some other such problem, ending in the finding of
a switch, some emergency bridge switch, that had been turned off for the first
time as a result of a miscommunication. We turned it on, everything worked, and
we felt guilty about calling Sonny over and spending his afternoon on it.
We're looking forward to Dad coming back tomorrow, and Bronwen's birthday. I'm
supposed to send this off today, and so though this is a horribly flat e-mail,
I'll close.
Emma
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