Baby!

Some of you may have been wondering why there has been no activity on the site or the blog even thought the cruising season has very much started;  I can now reveal that in January we got the amazing news that Carol is pregnant and we have a little one due on the 3rd of September!

This has obviously changed our plans somewhat and needless to say the cruise has been put on hold for a while.  We still plan to continue it at some point and will still spend time out on Kotare, but for the moment we have taken her up to Barcelona where she will stay until next summer.

I will still post occasionally about anything interesting that happens on our trips out, but I am sure there won't be anything to rival the Fornells saga! However, I do have quite an interesting story about the most elaborate way to steal €60.

After Kotare was put back in the water at the end of March at Sant Carles myself, Carol, Helly & Matt flew to Barcelona collected the hire car and drove down to spend 10 days on her with the intention of getting to Barcelona at some point.  The rough plan was the boys would sail and the girls would drive as we had to drop the car back to Barcelona airport at the end of the trip.  On inspection of the weather forecast it turned out we had a 2 day window, starting as soon as we arrive, before a storm was coming in that could potentially last 5 or 6 days.  The decision was taken to get up to Barcelona as soon as we could.  So after two days of very un eventful sailing, with the over night spent in a very average marina in Tarragona, we had finally made it to Barcelona on our third attempt!

We spent the remainder of the week relaxing and exploring some of the highlights of the city, it mostly rained and whilst we had some very good meals we also had a couple of really bad ones!  Beware some of the reviews on TripAdvisor! Matt and Helly left a few days earlier than us and we decided to keep the hire car a bit longer so we could do some more exploring.

On one of our last days we decided to head up Mont Juic to see the view across the city and this is where we were the subjects of an incredibly ballsy con that resulted in us having €60 stolen from us.  I will conclude the story in a follow up post as it is now time to start preparing the leg of lamb we are having for dinner and open a bottle of wine!