Saturday October 12, 2013
We’ve been back at the boat for a couple weeks now, and things have been, well, rather quiet of late. For the first week of our return we didn’t have the company of Luki and Elmari because they were still tooling around on their own vacation around the United States, and Luis has been rather phantom lately, popping up for a moment here or there, but mostly buried under a new pile of projects in his boat. Things around the marina became pretty quiet, and actually a little lonely. There was however a new neighbor that we came back to, but he’s unfortunately the kind of guy that will talk and talk and not get the clue that there are periods in the day that you actually want a little quiet time. We’ve actually been isolating ourselves to the boat much more now so we can get away from his constant yabbering. The guy just never shuts.up.
Even with the past week where Luki and Elmari have been back, everyone has been so focused on returning to their boat and diving into all remaining projects, that we hadn’t had any social time. Just when we were making plans to finally do something about that with Luki and Elmari, checking out a restaurant that proclaims they have the best burger in the Rio, we received a dinner invite from Luis. He was having another couple of cruisers from just down the river over for dinner and wanted to know if we’d like to join. I was ecstatic, the dinner club was finally reuniting. It was such a tradition our first few months in Guatemala that I’d begun to crave them while we were away, the good food and close friends ready to greet you at the end of a day.
As usual, the destitute kids (us) were told not to bring anything, that it was all taken care of. Determined to bring something to the table, literally, I spent the late afternoon making chocolate chip cookies for the group to enjoy as a dessert. When the sun had gone down our group gathered once more in the ranchito, and to add to my already excitement there was another treat waiting for me. Luki had used this as an occasion to whip up his world famous mojitos. World famous because I’m telling you about them now and I have a feeling there’s a few of you scattered about around the globe.
Instantly we all fell back into step as if we hadn’t all just been separated for the past two months. Â Conversation flowed, delicious food was served, and that sense of family that we’d been missing since we left Michigan has finally been restored.
