Puedo pagar con Disney Dollars?

ok, so Huatulco is weird. and a bit like Disneyland. Danny, we would have loved to have you stay longer but you're not missing anything in this particular port of call. Huatulco was founded - and I do mean founded from scratch, as in there was nothing here but jungle scrub - in the early 80's by the Mexican gov't as a sort of utopian model of sustainable development. 20-odd years later they are boasting about the enviromental sustainability awards, etc. that it has merited in recent years, but it seems to me to be at the expense of....soul? flavor? we could be anywhere. don't get me wrong - I´m all for ecologically sound development, having experienced the alternative ad nauseum - but is this the answer? really? I´m just not sure how I feel about it. makes you think - I'll give it that.

Knee-jerk liberal ranting aside, it's sort of fun to be back in a marina for a couple days. Being able to fill up water tanks from a spigot, and hose down the boat, are very special treats. There is even a power outlet to plug into! Whoa! That means we can get crazy and watch more than one movie in a night if we want to. And just the fact that we can do so, makes us want to. Ute has a whole new lease on life, having been rinsed only in dirty caustic seawater for the last few months. Fresh water is a whole different deal. When I saw how much hosing it took to make the runoff run clear, I understood why all of our clothes get dirty just from living on the boat....it's a sort of like if your patio furniture was what you sat on all the time, except you only hosed down the patio furniture once or twice a year. grime city.

I suppose it's sort of ironic that it's here in the (allegedly) environmentally sustainable port that we're spending water and power willy-nilly for the first time in our whole trip.... (I say allegedly because I haven´t noticed any place to pump out a holding tank, which strikes me as a pretty important part of keeping waterways ecologically balanced).

Anyway, we'll very likely set out to cross the Gulf on Wednesday morning. Where we next make landfall will depend heavily on how slammed we get in the crossing - if we get hit hard and we're tired we'll stop sooner, otherwise we'll try and plug through to EL Salvador. El Salvador! (You know you're traveling in a world conquered by Catholics when an entire country is named "The Savior"). We spent some quality time in gov't offices this morning getting all of our ducks in a row to check out of Mexico - looks like that won't be nearly as complicated as we'd thought it might be, which is great.

No news yet from Hebe.

To those of you who expressed interest in crewing for us through the Canal, now would be a great time to open up the dialogue about that....we can't yet pinpoint when that will be but we should start talking about it if you're serious and have the flexibility to travel on a couple weeks notice sometime between mid march and late april. we'll need a crew of five (minimum) to cross, and while we could hire locals when we get there, we want to give people we know & love first dibs. so - let's get this panama party started....

that's all for now. if we don´t internet tomorrow, then we may be offline for a couple weeks. Cheesr everybody! C&A