September 12 – November 21, 2024; 15780 nm and 2072 days after departure from La Rochelle

Yessss, it was such a nice surprise! Maybe not completely out of the blue(I mean, they had been together for already 8 years) but being jet lagged and just arrived after a long 20 hours trip we were overexcited and surprised to receive such beautiful news. Our little girl got engaged. Mum and Dad over the moon. And to celebrate such good news, Jana´s -soon to be parents in law- had invited all of us for dinner. What an exciting welcome! Martine, Benoits maman, had spoilt us with delicious French cuisine. Of course it first started with a proper “l’apéro”. Fancy snacks served with best champagne to toast the two love birds. When the champagne was finished it was time to go “à table”. There Martine presented all her divine cooking skills. Mouth watering beuf bourguignon cooked for endless hours, just so delicious and tender! Just thinking of it makes my mouth starting to salivate. You know I could go on with describing every yummy bite we had but I will stop now, promised. I’m sure you got it by now that it was more than luscious and we enjoyed it tremendously.

The weekend in Paris was just beautiful. Fantastic late summer weather allowed us to stroll a lot through town and inhale once more the special flair of Paris. Another fun part was that Jana had invited us to join a croissant baking class. That was so much fun and we learned a lot about ingredients. (Just in case someone wants to bake croissants – make sure to use proper butter! At least 85% of fat! Let me know if you need to know more info I’m more than happy to share our experience.)
After that exciting weekend it was already time to take the train to Essen. Time was just flying. Norbert had planned to stay only for a bit more than two weeks. He was going back early because he wanted to have enough time to get all the big projects done on Altimate while I was still in Germany. Many many duties, like installing new lithium batteries, inverter, washing machine (oh yes!!!) and much more. On the other hand me, I wanted to spend precious being together time with my parents. So the two weeks went by in a blink. We caught up with a few of our friends and visited Luis in Aachen for a weekend. Thanks again to our dear friends Natalie and Martin we had the luxury of having a car for the whole stay of our visit. That gave us the possibility to explore the surroundings of Aachen. We visited the pretty villages of Kornelimünster and Monschau. Fortunately largely spared from the great wars, Kornelimünster was still characterised by 17th and 18th century town houses. It was beautiful to see the historic centre of the village from the Middle Ages as it has been almost completely preserved.

Monschau was located further south of Aachen in the hills of the “North Eifel”, within the “Hohes Venn – Eifel Natur Park” in the narrow valley of the Rur river. As well as Kornelimünster the historic town center has many preserved half-timbered houses and narrow streets which have remained nearly unchanged for 300 years. Also amazing on the heights above the city sits Monschau castle, which dates easily back to the 13th century. But enough wikipedia information! For us much more important was of course catching up with Luis. The impressive historical surrounding and the beautiful autumn weather made it just even more pleasant to get up to date with Luisito. Yet again the weekend went by much too fast. Norbert took the train to Paris for a quick overnight stop at Janas place and then already headed back to Altimate. I went back to Essen and moved in with my parents. Before, like always, we were generously hosted by our former neighbours and dear friends Kissy and Alex. Once again a big thanks to all of you. Your friendship and generosity is very much appreciated.

To get my mum a rest from the duty of looking after my dad all year round I suggested to look after my dad for a week so she could take a week off. And so she did. She went off with her dear namesake friend Helga to Bad Zwischenahn. A pretty little town which was located at a beautiful lake in the northern part of Germany. The girls had fun and my dad and me had precious dad-daughter time. Unfortunately the relaxing fun week was soon followed by a horrible sick week. A stupid stomag bug had caught my parents. Thanks to that mean virus we could not do the fun things I had planned to do with my mum after she came back from her time-out week. Sadly we were running out of time. Well, to find at least a little positive in that literally shitty experience, I could look after my parents in that uncomfortable situation. I made sure they drank, ate and slept enough. Oh and I started almost a new career in preparing boring mild diet dishes looking like fancy meals. I can tell you mild diet dishes don’t appear very delicious. I’m sure that could be a business, couldn’t it? Anyhow at least I like to think that my humble efforts helped to made their recovery a bit faster. I was definitely very strict regarding their diet! No cheating was allowed. Just watery porridge and mild soups… Oh yes I do can be strict!

More than three weeks were gone and it was time to for me to travel back. In contrast to Norbert I allowed myself a few more days with the kids. I spent a couple of days in Aachen with Luis and then headed further to Paris to spent the weekend with our lovebirds before flying back to Deltaville.
While me being in Europe El Capitano had worked like crazy! By the time I got back he had managed to tick all the boxes of the projects we wanted to be done on Altimate. It was an awful lot of work as he did e.g. not only all the cabling for the batteries by himself he also made the right sizes for cables as well as cable shoes and what ever was necessary to install the batteries. He had to find places for the new inverter, the new water heater, he had to install and fix it. For my new washing machine- yesss you do read right! I got a tiny but fully working washing machine!!! That was a huge challenge. First he had to find a safe space for it. Then a way to install it as it had to be fixed on a wall. So poor Norbert had to built a small wall inside of our “cellar” with plywood to be able to install the washing machine. I AM SO DAMN PROUD! He did it and it works! Awesome!!! I am in washing heaven!!!! Oh he did much more but that was THE most important part for me. I’m sure most of you do understand my excitement!!!???

I arrived late Monday evening October 28th on Altimate. The very next day after saying hello and at the same time goodbye to the friendly staff of DYC marina and some other sailors we left Deltaville. Back to Annapolis to get our last projects done on Altimate, a new rigging, new safety lines and a new cutter stay. All that for safety and being perfectly prepared for the future years. It was a fast, two day but already fairly cold ride up to Annapolis. Boy was I glad that we have a nicely working heater. We arrived just in time for halloween and were lucky to see some fun scary halloween decorations. The weekend was quiet and relaxing which I appreciated very much. Finally I could relaxed enjoy being back home. On Monday we moved from Spa creek to Back creek where the mast was dismantled and the rigging would be done. Quite an experience to see your mast being lifted and flying in the air. Just strange to see that suddenly our Altimate turned into a sad looking motorboat. But hey she would look like that only for a couple of weeks. And after re-rigging she would hopefully look like almost new. Back at our favourite spot in spa creek we still had some projects to do. Only this time they were more like volunteer fun projects. As anyhow everything was dismantled including our lazybag, I had decided to sew our logo onto it and since I was already at it, I also quickly sewed in a new zipper. Challenge accepted! The zipper part was easy, just annoying as the most work was to rip of the old one. The fun and finicky part was the logo. I did not tell anybody but I also purchased a new super fantastic sewing machine. My old Chinese one was just a nightmare! Completely rusty and almost falling apart. When I tried to sew I usually spent an hour to get going before even start at all… But now with the new and willingly working machine it was so much fun!!! Within a blink all the letters were sewn on. With the right tools work can actually give pleasure! Who would have thought. Annoyingly our flexible solar panels did break just after we have had made our Bimini. So another sewing project turned up. New frames for new solar panels. But with my new baby not a problem and fast done.

After our sewing projects we did a lot of provisioning. Our plan was to get ready to go south as soon as the rigging would be ready. Not only because meanwhile the weather got really cold but also because we were just more than ready to move on. At the end of the second waiting week we were done with all our duties. So suddenly we had some play time. We decided to get a car and visited Washington DC which was only a 45 min drive from Annapolis. That was a welcoming and interesting break from all the work and hustle we had had the last weeks. Strolling along the mall was quite impressive. We visited a couple of the many free museums, passed by Mr. Lincoln before having a short coffe break somewhere. Visiting the White House was not possible so we tried just to have a look at it. That too turned out to be difficult as it was of course completely fenced and surrounded by a pretty garden with high trees. We kept on walking direction capitol. Boy we didn’t realise how long the national mall was stretched. By the time we reached the Capitol we were so exhausted that we only wanted to sit in our rental car and enjoy a warm and comfortable ride back.

Next Monday was the day. Steve our rigger had called to tell us we could come to get Altimate back to look like a sailing boat. It took them three days to replace and install everything. Steve offered us a sea-trial to check whether everything was working fine. Early Thursday morning the 21 of November 2024 Steve jumped aboard Altimate and we headed into the bay of Annapolis. Steve was a passionate racing sailor next to his professional knowlegde about sailing boats. He moved on deck like he was magically attached to it. It was amazing to see how fearless and easy he was moving to the bow and back with sails up and Altimate healing over. Checking all the new bits and parts as well as the new stay sail. We on the other hand would have crawled on all fours feeling rather uneasy. When he was satisfied with his control check he even showed us how to tag the genoa around the stay sail without furling it. After about 1,5 hours we headed back to let Steve out and then we were finally ready to go south!!! Bye bye Annapolis