12/28/2010-1/1/2011
After two more trips to the Emergency Room at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, and two more packings for Big Red, we are still hanging out in Lake Worth while my leg continues to heal. Tomorrow I am to remove the packing from Big Red myself and assess whether or not another trip to the hospital is necessary. Hopefully, the wound has healed enough from the inside out that no more packing will be needed. We will remain here in Lake Worth until it looks good enough to leave convenient medical care.
You would think we’ve been bored but we really have not. Each day continues to pass quickly as we take care of the daily necessities of life aboard a boat. Gary makes trips ashore to local stores for whatever we need for the day (I haven‘t been going with him because of my leg), and cares for the outside of the boat. I take care of the inside and do the galley slave stuff. He does the grilling, when needed, on a propane grill attached to a stern stanchion. As far as tasks are concerned, the division of labor is pretty much the same as it is at our land home.
We decided to treat ourselves to a boat slip rental for New Year’s Eve, thinking we might go to a nearby restaurant for the evening. However, when we went to the restaurant to make reservations and found smoking was allowed, we decided to prepare dinner on the boat and spend the evening aboard instead. We had a wonderful meal, played Parcheesi, read for a while, and took a short nap while we waited for the previously set alarm to announce the dawning of the new year. Surprisingly, there was not a lot of partying going on around us and we were able to peacefully fall to sleep around 12:05.
The boat slip rental provided opportunity to use the marina’s open-air laundry (only in the tropics), electricity to use a hair blow drier to defrost the refrigerator’s freezer, and lots of water for Gary to wash the decks of the boat.
A few comments on trying to get to the hospital: We have yet to conquer the city transit system. One day we tried to take the bus to and from the hospital, failed miserably on our attempts to figure it out, and both times we got on the wrong bus so we had to walk approximately one mile each time we messed up. (On two good legs that would not have been a problem.) Our hats off to the people who ride these buses routinely and effortlessly get to where they need to go. I think I’ll do research on America’s city transit systems and write a book entitled “Using City Transit Systems—For Dummies”. The third time we had to go to the hospital, we took a taxi, both ways.
Our friends on the west side of Florida said, “All the rich people are on the east side of Florida.” We disagreed and stated just the opposite is true. Our time spent in North Palm Beach, on the east coast, confirmed our friends must be correct. Gary has noticed on his frequent excursions ashore, the amount of expensive foreign cars there are in this area. While we were at the hospital one day, a Bizillion dollar Rolls Royce pulled up in the drive. Cars of this status are commonplace in North Palm Bay. Also the marina, where we rented the boat slip for New Year’s Eve, is home port for a plethora of mega-yachts. We took a dinghy ride around the marina while staring at the size of the yachts with our mouths hanging open in amazement. My comment to Gary was, “The yachts in this marina are worth more than the homes in our whole subdivision.” Size is relative. White Swan sounds pretty big to a boater on the small lakes in Indiana, but among the mega-yachts in this neck of the woods, our boat looses prestige. However, that’s okay with her captain and first mate. We love our White Swan.