December 20, 2013-Christmas in Colombia

wingssail images
Merry Christmas

I’ve been scanning old log book pages and saving them on the blog and while doing that I end up reading and reliving each one. This week I have been working on 1989, when Judy and I were still in Seattle sailing Wings and living aboard, and I enjoyed remembering those old days.

Then, as I saved the page I was reading, my screen saver popped back into view and it showed a beautiful shot of Judy from 2013, on Wings, laughing with some of our crew, and it was from a race here in Cartagena.

wingssail images
Then and Now

And it struck me that we are so lucky to have had this life. We started out doing something we loved more than 27 years ago and here we are, still at it, still enjoying it.

And my Judy, so young and beautiful back then, and so in love with life and with our life, here she is 24 years later, still racing on our Wings, still lovely and still in love with the life we live.

This makes me very emotional.

Now it is Christmas and we are in Colombia; another new country, another holiday season away from home, and it won’t be the last.

We, like the other cruisers, try to fill the void we feel from being away from family and friends at these times: we have pot-luck dinners on occasions like Christmas and Thanksgiving, we gather at some marina common area or on a beach in some bit of paradise somewhere, and we laugh and talk and heap our paper plates with food that never quite seems like the dishes we remember from family gatherings we had back home, and we make the best of it.

But honestly, we’d rather be with you all.

This week we went into Old Town with some friends we’ve met here, Geoff and Omar, from the yacht Un Mundo, and we had a nice dinner and drinks at one of our favorite spots in Cartagena: Plaza Trinidad, and we took the photos you can see in our wingssail-images pages, as well as the one we used in our card this year.

We really love our friends here, and we will miss Geoff and Omar when we leave. They are headed towards Cuba and then Miami and we are headed west through the Panama Canal so we will part company with them, maybe for good, as we have with so many cruisers we’ve met who became dear friends; that is the way of a sailor.

But at Christmas…it seems a little tougher.

Click here for more photos of Cartagena at Christmas time.

Click here for another photo of Fred & Judy back then.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Cartagena