Sunday, November 25, 2007

The Hitches Have Left the Building

Yesterday we sailed from Miami and have officially left the US. Well I guess not officially, we will still keep our Ohio address.

We spent this past week in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee with the Lee families. Spending our final days here with family and friends was very good but I am also anxious to get back to Grand Turk. I have been getting a furry of emails. Last week contractors working on a new condo development uncovered a cannon under about six feet of sand. The museum was called to identify the armament. Our cannon expert was flying into Grand Turk this week anyway, so I think this will all work out. I am looking forward to seeing this when I get back on island.

Thanksgiving was a joyous occasion, though the day was spent trying to finish up last minute work before we left on Friday. On Friday, the museum had an application due for the British Oversees Territories Environmental Program grant. I finished this on Thanksgiving and sent it to Deborah. I talked to her on Friday morning. With the grant, the permissions for survey work we are putting together, and the cannon identification, she sounded a bit overwhelmed. I think her exact words were, “You said this job would be easy while you were gone, you better make sure that the Triumph lands at Grand Turk.”

The Triumph? On Friday we left Gatlinburg and drove to Miami. We boarded the Carnival Triumph and are taking a cruise ship down to Grand Turk. It is the last stop on the cruise.

I had trepidation about how much stuff we packed. Those of you who saw the van will know what I mean. All last week we cleaned out our house. We packed a rental van last Saturday. I looked in and thought we had just more than a manageable amount of luggage. On Sunday we had a mad rush to finish packing what we wanted and storing what we did not. All five of us threw last minute “wants” into smaller bags. In the end, we had one super huge, too heavy to carry bag of “stuff,” ten suitcases of clothes (two a piece was going to be the limit), two bags of home school curriculum, two boxes of my books, sixteen carry on bags, and two skateboards. Thats right. You heard correctly. We checked 31 pieces of luggage. The best thing about the whole trip was the looks and questions about why you would let your kids bring skateboards on a cruise ship.

I was extreamly stressed about how we were going to get all the luggage on the ship. In the end it was no big deal. I gave a porter a $20, he loaded all our bags on a large cart and took them away. From the time we got on board until 10:00PM on Saturday porters brought bags to our room continuously. When I went up to the pursers office to enquirer about a lost soccer ball (thats right) there were ten unclaimed bags with the room tags ripped off; three of them were ours.

I have a lot to tell – I wish I had more room – I do try to keep to a word count.

I will give you a little foreshadowing:

We are an excessive people, the cruise ship is the epitome off this excess.

I thought the hard transition about this move would be living apart for three months. As it turns out, living apart is easy – the transition back to living together not so easy.

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