Vero Beach, FL

Our final leg of the trip for a few weeks is Vero Beach, FL - known to cruisers as "Velcro Beach" mainly because everything you need or want is here!  The city provides free bus transportation right from the marina to WalMart, Home Depot, West Marine, Publix grocery store, the mall, the movies, even to the hospital and doctors offices.  So convenient! We are currently on a mooring ball alone, but in a couple of weeks, there will be more boats than mooring balls, so they will be rafted to each other.  It's nice having a neighbor once in a while! We have never been here for Thanksgiving, but have heard that it is a really great event with hundreds of people, so we will see.  While we are here we will once again clean out Makai of "stuff" we have not used for awhile.  Seems this needs to be accomplished every few months for some reason. "Stuff" has a way of building up very quickly.  Then we will start to reorganize and restock for the Bahamas.  Provisioning for 5 months is no easy task!  Eva makes list after list to make sure we have everything that we could possibly need or want while in the islands from batteries to q-tips, she has it covered! We are not cruisers who live with little or no refrigeration.  Canned meat is not on the menu here.  We do have a refrigerator/freezer big enough to store a good amount and assortment of food.  The temperature inside is as good or better then a home unit with freezer holding at about -4 degrees fahrenheit. Buying fresh meats in the Bahamas is expensive, however in most places the meat is frozen and looks like something we would throw out if we found it in a dark corner of the ice box.  Meat is not supposed to be grey in color so we stock up here in the states before we leave. We will also get all our mail sent to us here and send out Christmas cards and packages while we have the opportunity. We are planning to do some boat maintenance while here like an oil change and replacement of the valve cover gasket to stop an annoying oil leak ever since we had service at Deltaville Boat Yard. Always something to do!