Re-provisioning and Rome

 

We live aboard full-time, but we leave the boat for a week or two, or three months, every year. Three months is the longest we've been away from home and the readjustment period is proportional to the time off the boat, but seems to get exponential if we leave for too long.

To compound the issue: when we hauled out in July, we weighed in at 17 tons, a whopping 4 tons over our listed weight. Scales aren't accurate, tanks were full, the sun was in the lift operator's eyes, etc. etc. There's no way we could have added 4 tons (4 TONS!) of weight in personal and boat stuff. Or could we have? We returned to the boat with a mission to purge. We did pat ourselves on the back quite a few times upon finding such a clean and well-put-away boat, which quickly turned to mayhem when we started unpacking boxes and suitcases from our summer travels, and simultaneously started emptying lockers. Do we still need our Bahamas chartbooks? Do we keep the old main halyard? We don't really need two anchors. Hold on! Let's not go crazy.

obligatory Ikea trip!

Getting back into our routines = weekly piano lessons for Freja

ordering hatch covers to keep out the damaging UV rays

additional solar

lotsa power!

 

At the same time as we were unpacking and purging and restocking our food lockers and fridge, we were spending time with friends and touring Rome. And we were having an additional 750 watts of solar added. (About that extra weight...) Oh and the kids really should be doing some schoolwork every day. It was a little frantic, a little chaotic, and we possibly caused a few stressors by taking on too much at once, but we got a lot done during that first week in Rome.

We spent one day touring Hadrian's Villa, rather, the remains of Hadrian's Villa. An emperor of the Roman times, Hadrian had a massive villa built for himself outside of Rome. It truly was epic. There was a massive reflecting pool which he walked around 3 (7?) times after lunch, another reflecting pool with statues lining each side and capped with a dining hall replete with a water fall, multiple baths, a conference room of sorts, a stocked fish pond, and his own personal fortress with a mini moat.

Remains of the stocked fish pool.

 
We toured a replication of an Etruscan village, completely researched and built by one guy--a true passion project. He made all the tools, musical instruments, did the cooking, and built the buildings using Etruscan methods. In the process he learned what worked and didn't work. He was, in a sense, fact checking work of archeologists and anthropologists.

Making ancient bread

Replica Estruscan village

 
Of course we spent a day visiting some of the top sights in Rome: the Colosseum, the Forum, and Palatino Hill. I got chills when we entered the Colosseum. It is so massive, so old; it was hard to take it all in, to really understand where we were standing and imagine life 2000 years ago. Gladiators, chariots, exotic animals. They even filled the Colosseum with water and staged naval battles with mini replicas.

Lucky us, we got to go on the inaugural sail on our friends' new boat.

A roving florist

one of each please!

The view from Palatine Hill

Colosseum

Colosseum

Hans being a good sport and letting us take him shopping.
It's too cold for board shorts!

Walking along the Tiber River

 

Halloween was fast approaching and our kid boat group was waiting for us a few hundred miles down the coast. Like all good sailors, we'd been watching the weather. The current pattern seemed to be winds from the south or not at all. We took the "not at all" option and made a delivery trip. We stopped for a couple days here and there, including the fancy pants island of Capri. I typically avoid the most touristy places, but when I found out that Capri was a resort island back in Roman Empire days, I classified it as a legit stop. It was gorgeous and dramatic and filled with tourists and high-end shops. We rented scooters for a day and drove out to the far west end of the island where the kids went for a quick swim and we drank aperols in the sun. We also took the single seater chairlift to the top and admired the views.

The clouds moved in quickly at the top of Capri

Single chair lift

The main plaza in Capri

There's our little anchor light!

Micro climates over the islands off Naples

Sisters.

Gaeta

Trapezing underway

We finally landed in Agropoli where three kid boats were waiting for us, and, just like our exit from Pollenca in June, we were greeted with cheering and trumpeting. Billy and Jake, the kids from s/v Kendra, even dinghied almost a mile outside of the harbor to welcome us as we were motoring in. It was a great reunion for kids and adults alike with lots of jokes and tall tales from the three months that we had been apart.

Gorgeous medieval town, Agropoli

Nicely protected anchorage, filled with our buddy boats.

We took advantage of the good anchorage and having friends in the harbor to rent a car for a day to drive up to Pompeii. What an incredible experience. Thanks to the recommendation from a friend who had visited in May, we hired a private tour guide which was worth every penny. Dario is an archaeologist, an academic, and a true historian. Instead of pointing out the specific sites and lining us up with good photo opportunities, he used the physical space to ask us more philosophical questions about what it means to study history, why do we study history, what connections can we draw between the past and the present, and what we can learn about ourselves by studying the past. Freja loves history and was very engaged with this higher level conversation. I even started taking notes! Matilda was very quiet for almost an hour and I was concerned that she was perhaps bored or that the conversation was a little above her head (she's only 11 after all!), and I was also impressed that if she was bored she wasn't complaining at all and was being very polite and respectful. After one hour of walking, talking, discussing, however, Dario asked a question about a specific feature in a door frame and she piped up with a thoughtful answer. We were all taken aback. She had been actively listening the whole time, and was doing a lot of internal processing. From that point on she was non-stop talking. It was the first time in my life that I've really felt the weight of history. It was more than just imagining what it was like to live in Roman times, being in Pompeii made me really think about how humans live on Earth, how we interact with one another, and how we interact with the planet. The tour was over 3 hours and we were all pretty tired by the end. I left with more questions and wanting to know more, but also feeling a little overwhelmed and done for the day. I highly recommend visiting Pompeii and especially hiring the same tour guide. It is well worth the money.

Amalfi coast

Look at that crust! The kids are happy because cheese-less pizza, Marinara, is standard on every menu. Even better, most of them have some anchovies sprinkled on top. Freja's standard order.

Pompeii's arena

A street in Pompeii, with raised sidewalks and crosswalks so everyone's feet stay dry.

You can see the ruts from the chariots.

the bakery--these are the mills where they ground the flour

lead pipes! the fanciest houses had indoor plumbing, otherwise central drinking fountains were located throughout the town.

the lockers at the men's baths

The market in Pompeii. Archeaologists have deduced that this central oval was the fish market because they found lots of fish bones in this area. the buildings/stalls surrounding the oval were for produce and meat.

wild children

 
From Agropoli it was time to move a little further south for Halloween festivities. All four boats anchored in Palinuro which had a nice sheltered anchorage and crystal clear water. The kids did a massive effort for a homemade Halloween with creative costumes and lots of fun snacks. They went trick-or-treating boat to boat via dinghy and we all convened on Esperance for a potluck feast. As always, we ate well, drank a bit, and capped the evening off with a little sing a long. Hugh played some Hamilton tunes on the piano which was definitely the highlight of Matilda's night, if not the entire fall season.

Teamwork makes dreamwork! Building Matilda's costume: the Hamilton star.

"Off with their heads!" - Queen of Hearts

I had a nice early morning hike up the point by the anchorage.

Hanging laundry whilst motoring

The season was drawing to a close and as most boats were heading to their winter marinas, we were kicking ourselves for not getting back to the boat until mid-October. But we had a fantastic week with friends and are very excited to get back together in the spring. A couple boats went east toward Greece, we were headed to Sicily, and other boats were on their way to Malta or the other side of Sicily. Sailing in seasons is tough and we're still trying to figure out how to maximize our sailing time in the Med while at the same time leaving for the hottest months and of course sending Hans to work every 6 weeks. These are just logistical challenges and we will readily adjust. But for now we're still in Italy, happily drinking Aperols and eating pizza and pasta nightly!