Category Archives: Preparing to cruise

Afternoon Gin (and Tonic)

Posted on by

If I’m going to have posts, plural,  named Afternoon Gin, I suppose I need to write more than one.  Lately I’ve been monitoring my gin intake and have decided that I need to cut back. This is a sentence I never thought I would need to write. But the delicious nature of the gin and tonic as a beverage, and the subtle yet real pain relief I get in my upper back from having one at the end of the day conspire to make me understand, for the first time ever, how a person might become accustomed to a drink every day. Not to worry. I will not be sliding into the unconscious medicinal use of alcohol. I’m just saying that for the first time ever I understand how such a thing might be possible for people.

I’ve been doing a lot of walking lately. We have only one car, and we like it that way. Overall, cars are not only expensive, they’re a pain in the ass. In fact, the car we have is the same old Mazda van we drove down to Mexico a few years ago and left to languish in a field during the hot Mexican summer one year. That may have been an unfortunate choice for the car, which has always felt delicate since then. Lately we have been planning a road trip of some length and the car needs some work, so I have been carless while it is in the shop.

View from a bridge in Olympia. If you drive this bridge, you don’t see the rainbow railroad tracks.

Did you know that the average car payment is now over 700$? I read that on NPR so it must be true. All I can think is, “Oh, hell no.”

Here’s an interesting result of being carless: when I dropped the car off a couple of days ago, I locked the door and handed over the keys to the mechanic, put on my hat and sunglasses, and set off to walk the 3 miles back to the boat, doing errands along the way. I felt positively free. That’s right. In a city of cars, in a culture where one is actually judged by the type of car they drive, I felt free as I walked away from our old Mazda van with the “You are a God Damn Magical Unicorn” sticker on the bumper and the plastic dashboard Jesus in the cabin. It occurred to me to wonder if I would still feel that way if it were over 100 degrees outside. Probably not. Walking three miles in 65 degrees is easy. In the heat, it’s a long way. I may enjoy walking, but I’m not unAmerican about it.

You do see a lot more of city life when you walk places. This is a mixed blessing. I avoid grown looking men on tiny bicycles. Sometimes this means I cross the street more often than is strictly necessary.

Also, there are three excellent bakeries within two miles of Galapagos. Three. One of them French. Two of them are uphill on the way, but downhill as you are eating your fattening (I mean flakey..) pastry.

Enjoying other people’s gardens on a walk.

Then there are people in cars doing questionable things. No, not that kind of questionable thing, although once in California I saw something going on in a car that I absolutely wish I had not seen. I mean, could they not have waited? Was having middle aged people walking close by the car part of their excitement? Was it a shock value thing? Or were they just so narcissistic that they thought people would enjoy watching them exhibit themselves? Maybe they thought we were too old to know what they were doing. We weren’t, more’s the pity. Or maybe they were just so, again, narcissistic that they felt like their exhibitionism was their right.  These were people I did not wish to know. I am glad to have left them in California.

And that makes me think about the time I was in another grocery store parking lot and came upon a man quite thoroughly enjoying himself with his pants down and his car door wide open. I’m pretty sure he was not targeting me with his need to have people witness his pathetic self. But I happened to be there. It’s one of those times I thought, later of course, of all the cutting things I wanted to say to him right in the moment. But the moment passed, fragile with shock, filled with disgust,  and I went away wishing I had passed by 5 minutes later. Or maybe 20 minutes. He seemed to be having trouble.

And they smelled good, too.

No, this was a different kind of questionable thing. I was standing at the crosswalk outside the Thriftway and yacht club down by the water, waiting to cross the street. I noticed the traffic coming out of the parking lot was stopped, even though the light was green. Then I noticed why. The first car in line, a white 4 door Jeep of late-ish vintage, was being driven by a man in his early 40’s or so. He had dark hair, looked like he was well groomed, kind of sporty looking, and had a big golden retriever, or maybe it was a yellow lab. I got confused about the dog because I was distracted by the fact that he was pointing his phone directly at me and taking my photo. WTF, dude? Why are you taking a photo of an older woman in a blue hat and sunglasses,  pulling a little grocery cart packed with the gleanings of her errands, and walking back to her boat? I am not a tourist attraction, mister. It was…unsettling. I mean, why? What’s he going to do with that photo? Do I want to know? And if he makes money off it, should I not be offered my cut? Is he a fricking weirdo? I gestured wildly at him as he put his foot on the pedal and turned left. I hope he saw me. Or maybe I hope he didn’t. I’m not sure, actually. I don’t carry a gun. Maybe I should. No. I definitely should not.

I think it’s important to note that I don’t believe for a moment that any of these experiences were targeted at me personally. I mean, walking through the fields of life, you’re bound to step in a few cow patties along the way. They’re there. You can’t always see them before you step in them. These men in cars? They are just cow pies to me. I rinse off my shoes and carry on. It’s not my job to take care of their karmic debts.

I’m continuing to work on refinishing the teak dodger. Five years from now I’m probably still going to be working on that because I can only do about an hour or so at a time before I start hurting. At this point, all the wood is at an angle, most of it above my shoulders. Part of me wonders if I can just go to sea and let the old paint and varnish  wear off naturally, sanded away by salt and wind. The outside looks good. Just don’t come aboard and we’ll both be happy.

Mike removed the windlass from the aft deck. It’s a great windlass but we have only used it twice and during one of those times we determined that it was too dangerous for us to use it regularly. We were anchored off one of the islands at the mouth of the Sea of Cortez and we engaged in what is commonly known as a ‘shit show’ with that windlass. It was dark. It was windy. It was not pretty or safe. We are having to make a lot of decisions about how this boat is outfitted so we can move forward with phase two of the cunning plan. I am glad we have some experience using the boat the way we, personally, use it. The removal of the windlass is one of those decisions I hope we don’t regret, but if we do, so be it. We have other ways of setting a stern anchor if we absolutely want one, and removing it makes way for a radar pole. You can’t have everything on any boat.

We  found a really nice radar pole set up at Longship Marine, the used marine goods chandlery in Poulsbo, WA. It cost us easily less than a third of a new aluminum pole and it came with a stout davit we can use to lift the outboard. I am thrilled that it’s made of aluminum and doesn’t require polishing.  The davit is another one of those modifications we hope will allow us to sail more gracefully into our older years. See what I did there?

We got out of Poulsbo’s Longship Marine for less than 1000$. For that we got: the aluminum pole/davit system, a set of Magma Rock and Roll stainless steel stabilizers for all those rolly anchorages where other people throw out a stern anchor, a dinghy swim ladder, a personal locator beacon, some mahogany for finishing out the hatch in the galley, a huge EasyStow inflatable fender (10$! I was so excited!), and a hefty stainless receiver piece to sit that aluminum pole into (after we isolate the two metals, or course). We felt positively smug. Then we went for celebratory ice cream.

What a haul! And our Mexico van came through for us again. The pole just barely fit inside.

The removal of the windlass revealed some wet core in that area, probably as a result of the time we were docking this beast down in Astoria and the transmission stuck in reverse, causing us to hit a big steel fishing boat behind us. That was a very bad day. Anyway, Mike cut the fiberglass (it’s really thick, you guys) and scraped out the rotted wood. We’ve had some gentle heat on it since then, drying everything out really well. He’s going to replace the wood with a piece of Divinycell core material and epoxy. They had some Divinycell at the local chandlery, in their new consignment section. I hope that place takes off. It’s easy walking distance to the boat.

Oh, by the way… that bid we got for replacing the whole exhaust pipe? 1700$.  Um. Yet another “Hell No!”  from Team Galapagos. We were supposed to get two bids: one for replacing the flexible coupling and one for an entire new exhaust pipe. We got one bid, for the new pipe, then had to ask for the other bid. 450$ to replace the O’Reilly coupling. We opted to replace the O’Reilly because the pipe was still in good enough condition that we don’t actually need a new one. Seriously, do we look like people who just throw money at a problem? I mean, did he SEE our van? 2002, baby! Even our plastic dashboard Jesus is showing wear.

Scene that cannot be appreciated via automobile.

Lately my Facebook feed has been filled with ads that include recipes for yummy looking mixed drinks. It’s like the algorithm finally, after all these years, got it right.

Michael is cursing from the shower, where he is changing out a faucet. I heard banging before the many very specific words. This doesn’t sound good. I need to run.

I leave you with this dock friend.

 

S/V Galapagos, standing by. Sort of. I mean, our radio isn’t actually hooked up right now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edison House Stories: Time Space Continuum

Posted on by

Every day I wonder where the time went. Today I have made myself sit down and grab some time to organize my thoughts; a much needed respite from life under a firehose. It’s self imposed, I mean, we did buy an old house and we expected nothing less than all the projects we have before us. The difference between buying this house and buying our house in Lakewood (aside from the ridiculous price difference) is that we have a time schedule on this house. We want it done in months, not years. Because we want to go cruising again. We are moving fast and honestly, I do not know where this energy I have comes from. It’s probably due to having a sense of purpose and firm goals. We are no longer meandering into the future without a care for our own mortality. We have things to do and places to go and we need an income that will sustain that. This is, if we play our cards right, house #1.

This photo is from the historical society and was taken sometime in the 1940’s.

Although we have not moved into Edison House yet, we spend our days there every day. We have a little routine that is satisfying. Mike and I are both working actual jobs, although his job is way more demanding of his time than mine is right now, and we awaken at the Wilson Street house where we have been living with Claire and Dan, get marginally dressed, gather our cellphones and laptops, and walk around the corner to Edison House to begin our work day.

We are finding that we really do like this house very much. We like the size; fairly small by today’s standards, and we like the layout. We like the young man who rents the attached apartment and has lived there for 2 years. Three floors means we are moving up and down stairs all day, which is good for our bodies. We like having our own offices upstairs. We love having a basement. We love the high ceilings. Even the weird little fireplace has grown on us. And I got to use my little speak easy peekaboo door twice so far! It’s as much fun as I thought it would be.

Peek a boo! I just love this thing. Come see us so I can use it more.

My office is shaping up. Notice the ‘chair’ in the corner, made from Galapagos’ old cushions. That little project is on pause right now.

Something we learned on the boat is to really appreciate the use of small spaces and not overwhelm them with ‘stuff’ or large furniture. The size of things becomes especially important when you consider being able to move things in and out of the house, a consideration we never worried about in the Lakewood house with its many wide doorways all around the house. For instance, we are doing a complete tear out and remodel of the kitchen. During the design process I had to decide on the size of refrigerator we wanted. American refrigerators are ridiculously huge in my opinion. They are almost a caricature of American excess. After living with a boat fridge for 4 years and finding that overall I had TOO much space in there, I was not inclined to get anything bigger than the current 30″ fridge that already lives here. When we moved that fridge into the dining room to begin clearing out the kitchen, I realized that even if I wanted a bigger one, I wouldn’t be able to get it through the door! So 30″ fridge it is and will remain. And I’m fine with that.

Speaking of the kitchen, I recently had the joy/back breaking labor experience of removing the hideous ceramic tile, along with 3 additional layers of old flooring; exposing the beautiful original fir underneath. This house is built with 100% Pacific Northwest old growth Douglas Fir and I try not to think about those old trees coming down. All I know is that now every floor has fir that is 15/16″ inch thick and it’s gorgeous. Even the oak floors in the living room and hall are underlain with fir. There is a solidness to walking in this house that speaks to its existence of close to a century.

Underneath everything, the original fir floors. They need cleaning but soap and water will do most of the heavy lifting.

Revealed beneath the unfortunate choices of decades of living.

For now the kitchen floor is covered in the black mastic that is probably made with horse hooves, and turns out to be water soluble. There is a lot of washing of the floor on hands and knees coming to my body in the near future, but I can now take a break from that floor and move on to other destructive activities. I am enjoying the process of discovery as we peel back the layers of this house to its bones, revealing the choices residents of the past have made for better or for worse.

Like the tile in the bathroom. I am dead excited to pull this tile off the wall. My exploratory shenanigans uncovered pink and white candy-striped wall paper. Who knows what may lie beneath the tile of the tub surround, also being torn out, and under the floor tile? That floor is higher than the floor in the hallway, so there is something under there. Maybe just fir, but I’ll be finding out soon. As an aside, if you suffer from any kind of anxiety or even anger, a good tile tear-out is a great way to let it go.

This tiny bathroom offers many design challenges but I already have a vision. Sure, it’s not entirely solid yet, but it’s coming along.

This is the mess of paint layers on the medicine cabinet. So. Many. Layers.

The explorations continue with stripping about 20 layers of paint off of the medicine cabinet in the tiny bathroom. Originally I was going to just take this thing out, but it’s really built into the wall and would be a real act of destruction to remove it. Better to be more conservative in the truest sense of the word and see if the original wood can be brought back to life. So much of the decision making about how to go about upgrading this house must be made carefully, not only with a nod to the history of the house, but also with the checkbook firmly in mind.

Revealed beneath the tile: pink candy striped wallpaper and a bit of crumbling plaster. The Our Old House forum on Facebook is a wealth of information on how to stabilize and repair things like this plaster.

The electricians have started. So much of the remodel money is going to be spent on things like electrical and plumbing. But that’s like spending money on a rig on a sailboat. You hate to do it, but it must be done in order for the vessel to be safe. Same on houses. We will not be risking an electrical fire on this house. We are dealing with a lot of deferred maintenance but, again, we already knew that going into this. It’s not our first rodeo.

In terms of plumbing, let’s just say that whoever fixed the leaky drain on the tub did not have an eye to the future. I’m going to show you a photo, but if you are a plumbing nerd, please avert your eyes. It’s bad. The plumber just shook his head. When a plumber has no words you know it’s bad. And yes, it does leak onto the basement floor. There are a lot of plumbers in this neighborhood of older homes. I see them when I take walks, their useful vans of tools trundling down the roads to their next jobs. If you want job security, be a plumber or an electrician.

So ugly. And yes, it does leak.

That bathroom is not as bad as I previously thought, though. Whereas I had immediately had dreams of pulling out that old tub and putting in a free standing tub, I have changed my mind. What changed it? I took a bath last night after yoga. I used the tub that exists there already and decided I like the way it feels. It’s deep, and solid, and supportive and original to that part of the house. The new plan is to keep it and have it refinished. That’s going to save both money and the tub and time. I still have to rip out all the tile and replace whatever it’s installed on, but we can open up that wall where the plumbing lives and then the plumbers have easy access to running water lines up to the second floor where our final project of any size is waiting. I’m getting excited about the possibilities in the bathroom and the kitchen isn’t even done yet. Whoa, Nellie. I probably should slow down, but how?

These walls. They will succumb to my prybar and hammer. Soon. Very soon. I know just the place to repurpose the fir flooring that goes halfway across this ‘closet’. Halfway? I mean, come on!

On to the upstairs. This little space is about to yield to my hammer and pry bar. I’m going to remove the pitiful excuse for walls in there so the plumber and contractor can explore the space. We need a second bathroom upstairs. Any money we spend on that will be money well spent whenever the house gets sold again (probably after I’m long gone from this earth but don’t quote me on that). Our contractor has some good ideas for enlarging the space, and the plumber has some good ideas for how he could plumb it in. It’s well located just above the other bathroom. If that works out, we will have a 3 bedroom 2 bath with a garage close to town. Did I mention that a lovely French bakery is moving in next to the yoga studio, 1/2 a block away? They’ve been in business down the road about a mile, but are moving to a larger location. Yay! It’s like they knew we were moving in and wanted to be neighbors! It’s not quite the same as Bahia de Navidad in Mexico,  with its French baker who delivers to boats, but it’s a great second to that. I’m envisioning Saturday morning coffee with a real croissant.

Some little vignettes. We try to maintain a little civility here. We’ve moved the ‘kitchen’ into the dining room, along with the tools.s

And speaking of neighbors, I was greeted yesterday by a woman named Brandi in an older SUV as she was turning the corner in front of the house. She liked my overalls. I was seriously confused by her comment because these are probably 15 years old, have boat bottom paint on them, as well as various other grimy substances. These are my serious work clothes. They take a beating and keep on going. What she really wanted was to know if we were moving into the house and to say welcome to the neighborhood. Oh, and to offer me some Irises from her yard and to tell me that she is very excited that we are going to repaint the exterior (Everyone is very excited about that, apparently. Pumpkin Spice is an unfortunate color on a house.) It was very nice, almost heart warming. I hope she can come see the house after we’ve finished the remodeling.

And what of the spirits of the house? I’m sure you’ve all been sitting on the edges of your seats wondering if we have any ghosts hanging around. Well, we aren’t sure yet. There have been some interesting little things like knives being misplaced and found in strange locations later. But that could just be our old and overloaded brains. I do sometimes get the sense that people are watching me in an interested sort of way as I get into a meditative state doing the labor of pulling tile, especially when I was doing the kitchen floor. But that may or may not be something to take note of.

And then there is Grace. Or at least that’s what I call her. Grace is 11 and popped into my head yesterday when I was at the house alone applying stripper to the medicine cabinet. She opened the conversation with a query. “What are you doing?”. Um, what?? “What is that you are doing?”. We went on from there as this external voice chattered on in my head about all the work being done on the house and how excited her mother was that I was taking care of the place. Ooookaaaay….

Mike taking measurements of the fireplace. The cheesy but useful electric fireplace has to go. On the other hand, it offers heat, and both blue and red lights! What a find!! Original flickering candle sconces: a definite ‘stay’. Rug is a classic GoodWill find.

I don’t know who or what Grace might be, which insults her greatly, but my questioning nature and internal skeptic is always firmly in place when these things happen. There have been a handful of times in my life where I have had a connection with someone dead. I wrote about my friend Betty, who spoke to me for days after her passing. I also had some pretty strange experiences on D’arcy Island a few years ago before our cruise. So it’s not unheard of, but as a general rule, I don’t go around listening to or speaking with those who have slipped the old mortal coil. Anyway, Grace followed me back to Wilson House and I finally had to ask if it was possible that I could go to bed without listening to her delightful, if not a little disturbing, chatter.

Is she a ghost of the house somehow? Is she even real? If she isn’t real, then why am I having conversations that feel as though I’m not initiating them? And what is reality anyhow? Haven’t we learned in the last few years that reality is flexible and people get to choose to believe whether factual things are, in fact, fact? Don’t we now believe in secret cabals and reptile people and space lasers and that the earth is actually flat?  I don’t know the answers to any of these things. All I know is that everytime I mention the possibility of Grace not being real I hear this: “I AM, TOO, REAL!”. That response is so ‘eleven’. So I’ll let you know if she sticks around, whoever she is.

Enough of this sitting around and chewing the fat with the blog. I have walls to paint and tile to rip out and paint to strip. Time is flying by.

Yes, Gracie, there probably IS asbestos in that old floor tile.

Oh, by the way! I forgot to say check out the March edition of Good Old Boat magazine for my article on anxiety and sailing. 

 

 

 

Second Time Around

Posted on by

I’m sitting in my mostly empty house running down the seemingly never-ending list of ‘to do’ items in the coming days.  You will never know how many little projects your home needs until you move out of it. In fact, I think all homeowners should have the opportunity to move OUT of their homes every ten or so years just to keep things fresh. In my life I’ve remodeled two houses and bought an old boat and refitted that. I thought I knew what hard work felt like. But I’ve never worked as hard as I have in the past three months, and that’s saying something. We need a vacation. How about a trip to Mexico?

Playa El Burro. You can barely see  S/V Galapagos.

Slowly but surely we are getting the hard work done to prepare this house for new renters; renters who are not our children. It was great renting the house to our kid and his friends. The bar was super low in terms of what they expected of the house. Since Andrew grew up here, he was used to the fact that the three way switches in the kitchen and office were wired incorrectly. He didn’t expect there to be a doorbell; people just knocked. The old  dated pale yellow wallpaper felt warm and comfortable to him. The grout in the family room and kitchen, well, hasn’t it always been black? The chipped paint on his bedroom door wasn’t an issue, much less the fact that there were two different kinds of doorknobs on the doors off the hallway. The nicked and scratched paint on the cabinets in the kitchen? Part of the patina; evidence of a room well used. All the scratches on the solid fir doors left by various dogs over the years? Ahhhh, we love the memories of those pooches. And are all those growing green things in the landscape actually weeds that set a million seeds? Who knew? These things have flown beneath the family radar for 18 years. We just didn’t care about them. (Except the weeds. I totally cared about and took care of those. All the time.) But now that we are trying to make the home attractive for other people, we do care about those things. As well as thousands of others. 

Yes, having Andrew and Friends move into the house worked great while it lasted. The mortgage got paid, the kids had a much nicer place to live than they could have afforded individually, and Mom and Dad got to move onto their spiffy old boat and pretend that they would never have to come back and face the music that is moving out of the home you’ve owned for many years.  We downsized our possessions quite a lot, and then we just kind of … left. On some level we knew it was too good to last. And we were right. Kids get married and go off and do the things they are meant to do in life.

When we left last time, all of our furnishings stayed right where they were. This time as we clear the house we are faced with choosing which things to keep and which to let go of. It’s probably not a surprise that I don’t let go of furniture easily. Once it’s gone, I’m fine, but the parting is hard if it’s a piece I like. And I do like furniture. Some of the most ‘historical’ (a word which here means I’ve probably had it for decades) pieces are being given to family and friends, which makes the parting a sweet sorrow tinged with a good bit of happiness. The velvet living room chairs and antique mirror going to a cherished ‘adopted’ daughter, our own daughter’s best friend; the piano of my childhood going to our very close friends who live just across the street; our green four poster bed borrowed by some of Andrew and Jill’s best friends, the ones with the new baby; Andrew and Jill choosing our sofa and a couple of stuffed chairs for their future home.  Even my own sister and mom are taking a couple of things. We infuse meaning into these giftings of furnishings with the history of the Boyte-White family woven into their very presence.

And so here we are; sitting in a house with little furniture surrounded by a yard with almost no weeds as summer disappears into the darkness of fall, slowly but surely moving stuff out of all the rooms. It’s a little like gradually disappearing.  In the end we are going to wind up exactly how we started in this house: living in one room, sleeping on a mattress on the floor surrounded by the few things we need to live day to day while we finish cleaning and remodeling the rest of the house. We are still on target to ‘leave the dock’ for the second time sometime in October. 

Astute readers will be asking the obvious: But where are Andrew and Friends going? The friends had a baby and moved on. But Andrew and his wife, Jill, are preparing for their own traveling adventure. They’ve been planning to do some extensive traveling and their plans are coming to fruition. They are outfitting their Honda Element for camping and about the time we leave for Mexico they will be heading off on a cross country trip and then to Europe. They fly from New York to Paris in December (BRRR) and plan to sell their Honda when they get to North Carolina. After a stint in Europe they hope to get to Ecuador to visit our Claire and her Dan, and then we are crossing all our fingers and toes they will come do some crewing for us aboard Galapagos, wherever we are at that point. You can follow along on their travels if you like, since they’ve started their own blog The Wander Blobs. Why that name? It’s a story, and I’ll let you go to their blog page where they define for you: What is a Blob? We are enormously proud of them both for having a dream that became a plan that is now a happening reality. 

And speaking of keeping dreams alive, we had the good fortune to meet up with the crew of S/V Totem up in Seattle. Jamie and Behan Gifford were the special speakers at the recent meeting of the Puget Sound Cruising Club. We last visited in person with them down in the Sea of Cortez where we made darn sure we got a chance to get them on board so we could pick their brains about our pitiful rig and our need for a new sail. They gave a great presentation on some very special places they’ve been and totally lit the fire for us again. Thanks, we needed that! Having our noses to the grindstone as we do, our cruising life feels so very far away, almost like it existed in a different lifetime. It was great to see them, and also to see so many of the cruising club folks we’ve met over the years. Kevin and Cressie on S/V Blue were there, as well as a few other ‘boats’ from the sea of Cortez. It was a little like old home week and makes one realize just how tight and small the cruising community is. It seems like a small world when you see people you knew down in Mexico back here in Seattle. 

In the same vein of keeping the dream alive, you’ll notice the photos I’ve posted are not from the house. Why would you want to see photos of me cleaning grout or painting molding? After listening to the Gifford’s talk I began thinking about all the many beautiful places we’ve seen so far that I haven’t written about. This place in these photos stands out.

These photos are of the the rock art you can find close to Playa El Burro, in Bahia Concepcion. Finding this rock art was one of more entertaining hikes we did as the weather began to warm up last May.   We anchored at Playa El Burro for this specific reason.  What I want other cruisers to know about finding this delicious rock art is that the guide book everyone relies on is wrong. The most popular guide book tells you that the trail head can be seen from the anchorage and this is not correct. There is no trail to the rocks. You can absolutely see a well defined trail going up the mountain, and there is a trailhead close to a small roadside restaurant. But if you take that obvious trail up the hill you will never find the petroglyphs and you will be very disappointed. I’ve taken photos to show you exactly where to go to find these spectacular pieces of ancient art. Go in the morning and you’ll have shade for your hike.  And the guidebook is totally right about the bell rocks! You’ll find huge boulders that ring like a bell when struck due to the iron content. I’ll go a long way to see rock art. But this place is really easy to get to.[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_llpgJgl9fU[/embedyt]

Back to my previously scheduled program of hard labor. S/V Galapagos, out.

This is sign by the roadway. You want to find this sign and then walk inland from the road toward the clump of trees. Once you’ve located your first petroglyphs among the trees, just keep going uphill from there, following the tumbled boulders. There are hundreds of pieces of art. It’s fantastic.

Here’s the view from the position of the sign.Turn around and walk inland to find the rocks.