Update received from Bill and Ellen Bane aboard the Nordhavn 46 Satchmo: We have hit the road, again, Jack. Ellen and I arrived in Tunisia last Monday, April 3. We spent most of the winter in Ostia, about 1 hour train/subway from downtown Rome. Our first "wintering on a boat" experience was great! This in spite of lots of rain. Thirty years of weather records showed December and January averaging 12-15 days of rain. We saw (felt) double that amount. This did not dampen (pun intended) our Christmas spirits in Rome, in our Spanish Steps apartment with our children, or our New Year's Eve when we and thousands of the other totally soaked (drunks) threw thousands of Prosecco bottles high in the air to burst on the cobblestones at Piazza del Popolo at midnight. To modify an old joke: An American asks the Ambassador how long he should visit Rome/Italy? "Well, a day is a delight. A week is better. A month is a lifetime experience. However, a year hardly scratches the surface." All the guide books fail to convey two things in particular. First, you really do not need a guide book. Traveling in Italy is like throwing darts blindfolded and always hitting the bull's-eye. Italy supposedly has something like 90% of the UN's World Heritage sites. This is easy to believe, and makes you more and more picky about the ruins and churches you seek out. Travel almost anywhere and they find you! No bad meals to be found. Second, the Italians are nicer, happier, more willing to help, and more exuberant than any people, any place in the world. We saw this over and over in small and large incidents. Having lived in Germany and hearing them and the northern Italians grumble about the southern Italians and Sicilians, we worried a bit about there being differences. There were differences. There is theft, but it is petty and by very poor people. It is an avoidable annoyance similar in effort to avoiding barking dogs in the USA - an irritation but nothing more. Italy is safe from all the serious crime too often reported in US city newspapers. And the southern Italians have turned out to have some similarities to USA southerners, in being amused by the self-proclaimed superiority of northerners: "What is the difference between Romans now and 2000 years ago? ...The Romans 2000 years ago had slaves; Romans today have the Milanese." We hardly scratched the surface of Italy and its many wonders, so we hope to return for a future winter. We are now here in Tunisia to meet our German friends for 10 days, and then will likely stay here for an additional few weeks. After that, Sicily to meet USA friends, stock up on wine and cheese, and head for Greek islands, where we will meet our youngest child with his girlfriend. At the end of September, our middle child Will will marry Ashley, so we will be in the States for most of the month while our boat rests in Turkey, we think. After that, we are planning to winter in Israel, near Tel Aviv. Everyone says there is a security problem in Israel. If there is, we are unlikely to know it (boom!). A boater who was there last year said, "Security is what everyone who is not here speaks about." We have been in Tunisia less than a week, but so far it has been fun. We spent the first night in Kelibia. This was a "real" (non-tourist) town with us rafted up 4 boats out on a pier right in the center of a "fishing school." This school clearly taught by doing. There were 40-50 beautifully colored and adorned boats filed with young men who gathered, left, and returned like the mass movements seen at school recesses everywhere! There was a scare, however, when "clearing in" (customs, etc.). Unlike the normal 20 minutes, we waited 2 hours, at which point I was summoned to the head official's office and grilled about my "German boat"...What? It seems that there was a very bad Frenchman in 1993 who owned a German boat named Satchmo! They were still looking for him with an enthusiasm that seemed justified only if there were a large bounty. The fact that our boat was constructed in 2000 had been overlooked, so I was "set free" with lots of offered help and good will. Traveling south to Hammemet, we needed cash. Off the boat at the cash machine I was shocked that it appeared I was back in the southern USA. The cash machine was run by the Amen Bank. Later in the day, we were washing the boat and met a very nice French couple who had a boat and apartment in Hammemet. They befriended us, toured us around Hammemet, and led us to a dinner at a wonderful fish restaurant near the center. The town is a summer place for well-to-do Tunisians from Tunis as well as foreign tourists. 120 hotels with a total of about 2-4 thousand rooms. One of the two presidents that Tunisia has ever had has a house/estate here, which he had plopped down on the beach requiring the beach road to divert a mile inland for about 3 miles. Saddam Hussain has/had an enormous (one square mile?) upscale housing development investment underway that is in good condition but shuttered up. I considered claiming it, for the USA of course. Prices in Tunisia are not predictable. The Hammermet boatyard offered us a single coat of bottom painting for $750 while I have an email offer from Athens, Greece for two coats for $600. We knew that diesel fuel was cheaper here. At about $2 per gallon vs $6 in Italy/Europe, we save about $3500 when we fill up. (This will last us the 6 month season.) Gin is priced at over $400 per gallon in the supermarket. Now, if I could only figure out how to distill diesel into gin..... Bill and Ellen M/V Satchmo El Kantaoui, Tunisia 35 53N 10 36E