Sunday, January 23, 2011

We Need Some Magic !

Happy Birthday to my brother Matt.  Matt, I hope your days this year are filled with adventure and good spirits.

We have settled into our life on a boat in a slip.  What a difference being in the water makes!  It is so much cleaner and we actually pretend we are in a boat, even though it doesn't move much.  Next step will be getting the engine fixed and off to be real cruisers.

Thursday was a bit of a fire drill with getting into the water and finding that the port engine needed 3 tiny screws to be working again.  Ron and Alan did a fire drill with our new best friends (Volvo parts dealers) via Skype and had a package sent next day air to Tucson.  Alan was already driving up there to get some other wayward engine parts -- so make it a real adventure.

Alan drove up with another cruiser, Dick, and they drove 960 miles in 36 hours -- UPS Service Center, Safeway, Home Depot, Trader Joe's and a dinky West Marine in Phoenix.  The second package of engine parts was due in  on Saturday morning, so at 10 am they showed up to UPS.

The UPS representative says to them:  Sorry we don't accept packages from FedEx, so we don't have your package.  WHAT??  FedEx had delivered it there....something about company policy, blah, blah, blah.  He finally went back to look at the packages and came out with our parts still stating it was a mistake, this was against policy, blah, blah blah.

But with package in hand, Alan and Dick headed for the border.....and only later did he discover that the package included some of the parts we wanted, but an error occurred on 1 part and the number was transposed so we got something we don't want!  I don't know how this will all work out.

Our back up plan is to ship the last part (if really needed) to Nogales to a mail service and do a bus run up and back.   We are really hoping this is not necessary.  So we are hoping for some mechanical magic tomorrow.

Alan and Ron have scrubbed Magic, we put on the new canvas I had sewn and she is sparkling at last.

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