by Michele | Apr 18, 2012 | Preparation Stage
I’ve never been the girl who spends hours in the bathroom or at the mall. In fact, most days I can be ready to leave within about 20 minutes of waking up (or at least I could before I had to prepare a miniature person too.) If I’m really being honest, I have nursed a certain pride about how much time and money I’ve saved by not getting my hair and nails done, foregoing makeup most mornings, and wearing the same dry-clean only outfit multiple times before finally giving it away.
This year for my birthday, most of my gifts were money/gift cards to clothing stores. Was my family trying to drop a hint? Possibly. Anyway, I went on a general shopping spree for some new summer clothes, including a shirt that I didn’t realize was “hand wash only” until I had taken the tags off and worn it. Ugh. Rule #1 of clothes shopping: don’t buy anything high maintenance!
And then it hit me: my whole life is about to become high maintenance! Every article of clothing will suddenly become one of two options: hand-wash or no-wash. Not only that, but all those “maintenance” chores that I hate so much are about to become much more plentiful. If I think laundry,* dishes, and mopping the floor are a pain, what about checking the bilge every morning, varnishing teak, and yearly haul-outs on top of making my old chores harder? Just a reminder that we aren’t planning on going on a permanent vacation, but living a new life, complete with all the chores!
Of course, if I’m gonna do chores, I’d rather do them in a tropical breeze.
*I hate laundry. To me it is the least efficient of all chores: unless you are naked, you will never complete it.
by Dan | Oct 19, 2011 | Preparation Stage
We have been extremely fortunate… we have a wonderfully healthy and exciting son, way too big of a house (there are rooms we haven’t seen for months), great cars, etc… you get the point. Our entire lives we had been told both through media and quite directly by teachers, friends, and even family at times, that we would be happy after we had just a little more money or a slightly larger house. We’ve gone through several iterations of a little more money and a slightly larger house and it isn’t fulfilling. What is fulfilling is our walks on the riverfront at lunch time, watching Carter try to figure out the world, marveling at the sunrises while hunting, talking with friends way too late in the night… life is what is fulfilling, not things.
We recognized this a few years ago but until recently were lost in the quandary of how to maximize life when we needed a constant flow of income to support our lifestyle. Living aboard is a perfect solution to this problem… at least for us. Living aboard will allow us to experience life to the fullest without the constant need for a large stream of income, all while experiencing some of the best sights and most unique people this world has to offer.
Western culture has been drifting away from reality for a while now. I was just over a friend’s house and there were two middle school girls that were good friends and hadn’t seen each other in a while. After the cursory greetings, etc they each whipped out their cellphones and began to text random people and post on their Facebook walls what they had done in the last five seconds since their last post. They then moved to the computer where more such machinations were to follow. Unfortunately it is quite normal for people to go work for 8-9 hours, start dinner, turn on the TV, and tune out of life until bedtime. In 10-20 years (hell, 10-20 days or even hours) will it matter what TV show you watched? What team won the sports game? Who the next idol is? No, it won’t. What will matter is what impact you had on the world. Whom you experienced life with. The time you were able to spend with your children. What difference you made in the lives of people you met. These are things that matter now and forever.
I don’t expect living aboard to solve any of my problems, but I expect it to give me the time to experience life. There are a lot of hardships involved with life on a boat, I get that. I don’t mean to demean the people living in western culture or even the people enjoying it, it’s just that I have found it to be unfulfilling and circular. What is the point of spinning your wheels maxing out yourself so you can buy the next great thing that you will need to replace in six months due to planned obsolescence? So you can do it all again? No thanks.
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.