Leaving Indiantown

January 3 – January 23, 2018.

Journey to Tucson, First Leg.

When we left Indiantown Marina on January 18 we had one small plan, get Greg to the dentist. For sometime now Greg has been spitting out deattached crowns and parts of his teeth. Since dental care is so crazy expensive, he has been regulating mastication to a few select molars and has eliminated hard to chew foods (pretty much all raw vegetables) from his diet. And although he has seemed fine with this state of things, I really wanted to eat salads again.

One of seminars we attended at the Rubber Tramp Rendevous last winter was about dental care in Mexico. There we learned about the Mexican border town of Los Algodones. Dentists in Mexico charge anywhere from a third to half the prices of dentists in the US and Los Algodones boasts 350 dentists in a 3 by 4 block area right on the Arizona/Mexico border.

Of course, going to a dentist anywhere can be a dreadful situation and choosing a new doctor is always kind of daunting – so research was going to be imperative. But because we were anxious to get on the road we decided to save the research until we got to our friend Deanna’s house in Tucson.

Before we could get on the road, though, we still had a few things to deal with after we hauled Blue Wing out of the water. We had already bought 6 months of food and couple months of beer. Leaving anything on the boat was not an option after hearing too many horror stories of rats taking up residence on boats in the storage yard this past summer, getting into food stores, and eating sails. (If you are interested in knowing more about these resourceful rats, check out this blog post from my friends, Chris and Jim) We were able to return much of the food and drink, but Aldi wouldn’t take back any and we didn’t want to return any of the beer we bought at the local Indiantown IGA grocery store since when we bought it we were given as bonus for spending over $100 of a couple chicken quarters and half a turkey (which ended being a bonus for other people since we gave it all away). So I sent out a note to the Indiantown Party Posse with a list of what I had left and offered everyone a 10% discount. Most of the food got snapped right up. But apparently our friends in the Posse are a little bit higher brow than Miller High Life (I know, it isn’t hard to be that high brow), so Greg started asking around the marina until he found a buyer for a good portion of the beer we had left.

We spent the next week making deliveries around the marina in between preparing Blue Wing for storage, doing a few small sewing projects, transferring our home from the boat to the van, getting Ballena Blanca packed and ready to hit the road, and searching the internet for new salad dressing recipes.

* All pics are click to enlarge.