Well time does fly! It seems that we have not updated the Sunflower Chronicles for 2 years!! I guess the focus has gone off cruising a little and moved to travel and sorting out various other issues.
Here is a brief recap on our 2013.
2013 was a very
different sort of year for us and for the first time since 2003 has
not involved any actual sailing at all! Which is a bit ironic seeing as we
celebrated 10 years of living aboard Sunflower in June, only we
weren't at the time!
That wasn't the intention
at the start of the year but it's just sort of how things worked out.
Sunflower was in the water at the marina in Finike, southern Turkey. We rented various cars and did a bit of driving around the many sites of the south western part of of this very picturesque country.
We then decided that it made sense to buy a car. After a lot of chasing around and trying to work out what we needed, we finally bought a KIA Sportage 4x4 (SUV), but that's another story!
We also had friends visiting from the U.K.
While all this was going
on Dee's left knee was giving her a lot of pain so x rays were emailed
back and forth to her surgeon in Sydney and we decided she should get it
sorted sooner rather than later, and so we arranged to return to
Sydney as soon as the last of our friends had left at the end of June
and return to Turkey before the next lot arrived in October!
So we spent 2 and half
months back in Australia. During this time we
spread ourselves around several lovely friends who were more than
generous with both their homes and their car keys:)
Dee had her left
patella (knee cap) resurfaced and spent 2 weeks in the same rehab
hospital she was in, in 2008. Many of the same staff were there so it
was almost like going home. Needless to say recovery this time around
was much quicker and she is now pain free again. While we were there
our house in Sydney got a face lift, with new paint on the outside
and new carpet on the inside. This was done partly because it needed
doing and partly because we anticipate selling it in the next year or
two.
We made it back to Turkey
5 days before our Aussie mates arrived to visit for a week. Once
they had left we had an |English friend staying and then the 'season'
here was over and most tourist shops and restaurants have closed.
Sunflower is out of the
water and stored on the hard standing area in the marina where she
will stay until mid April. We will put her back into the water in
May. We really miss the
cruising life and can't wait to feel the waves under our keel again
next year. At this stage we plan to cruise the Greek Islands for 6
months and return to the marina for yet another winter. After that we
are thinking we may head out of the Med and are still deciding
whether to turn left or right at Gibraltar. But that's a long way off
yet so we'll see. Several of our longer term cruising friends have
swallowed the hook and have sold or are selling their boats and
moving back ashore. But we would like to do a more cruising while we
are still willing and able to do so.
