Cadiz, Spain
Brussels for a day
We drove to Brussels, Belgium last night and slept in a parking lot next to a busy street. Today we awoke in the heart of a bustling city!
For breakfast we had, none other than the two things they are most famous for, Belgian Waffles with Belgian Chocolate! They were absolutely delicious!!
I’m keeping my eyes peeled for some Brussel Sprouts simply because I find humor in eating them here, but that doesn’t seem to be a thing in the city of Brussels (or they got tired of all the jokes and stopped offering them).
While this has been an awesome experience, we are leaving soon to visit the 1958 Worlds Fair site called Atomium. It is an enlargement of an iron atom made out of stainless steel!
The adventure continues!
Private French WiFi
I stand corrected. In France, free and public WiFi at restaurants or bars (our usual uploading places of choice) have incredibly slow WiFi.
In Spain or Gibraltar, we could upload a video in about 30 minutes while eating at a restaurant. In France, the same upload would say something like “1,522 Hours Remaining”! It was torture.
as a result, we began to form a backlog of videos to upload until Maddie’s parents came to visit.
They rented an Air B’n’B and this rentable personal home in Paris had private WiFi. I frequently run speed tests at places to see if it is worth the effort to do an upload and the fastest I had ever seen at a restaurant (in Gibraltar) was 98Mbps. At this house, the upload speed was 168Mbps! We were able to upload 10 full episodes in only 4 hours.
This is most excellent because every Sunday, when the episode goes public, we release the next episode to our Patrons. We had run out of episodes for them as we couldn’t get our work uploaded, but now we have!
Sailing off anchor without an engine
Our electric motor died on us (well, half of it did so we only have 10 of the 20kW available) and even though we never push the motor hard, it just doesn’t have the same thrust that it used to to maneuver us.
Instead of relying on it and being disappointed, we just ignore it’s presence and rely solely on our sails.
This means that leaving a harbor requires us to sail off anchor and arriving in a harbor requires us to anchor under sail.
In this episode, we leave Portimao (a narrow and crowded river) in Portugal and sail around 100 nautical miles offshore to Cadiz in Spain.
When our motor worked fine, this was still our primary method of getting underway as it doesn’t needlessly waste charge that we could use later on in our journey.
