by Michele | Jul 5, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Maybe we’ll set a few of these off when we leave
Today, people all over the United States will be celebrating Independence Day aka the 4th of July. We all get together for picnics and fireworks, and then tomorrow we’ll all go back to work. It leads me to reflect on how close Dan and I are to our own “Independence Day” when we can cast off the lines and really start our cruising life. Almost a year ago now, we took a hard look at what we would need to do to accomplish that goal, and we estimated it would take us around 4 years of saving and planning to have a comfortable cruising kitty.
That was a year ago. Now we’re sitting in office chairs wondering “what the heck are we doing here?!” We’ve come to find that doing the work-a-day life is significantly harder to stomach once you’ve realized there is another option. Judging by some of the other blogs that I have read by cruisers who have already left, we aren’t the only ones who have experienced the over-anticipation that occurs once you start planning to cruise. Frankly, 4 years is just waaay too long to tolerate under our current mindset.
Therefore, we have decided to speed up the process a little. By a little, I mean our goal is now to have our butts in the Caribbean by the end of next year. There are a lot of steps that we are currently evaluating, but let’s just say that things are going to start moving at a quicker pace in our house very shortly.
Independence Day, here we come!
by Dan | May 7, 2012 | Preparation Stage
This sums up why we wanted to move there. Bay of Islands, NZ
NaBloPoMo asks “What sports did you play as a child?” Michele and I certainly didn’t sail. I played pretty much every sport an American child in the Midwest can play, just not sailing. We’re talking basketball, baseball, football, floor hockey, soccer, swimming, track and field, you name it I played it. So how did Michele and I come up with the crazy idea to sail full time?
A few years ago I had watched the documentary [amazon_link id=”9492259486″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Ice Blink[/amazon_link]… At the time I thought little more about it than “Wow that’s cool.” The seed of sailing (and crusing) had been planted however. As Michele and I became more and more disillusioned with money and “stuff” we began searching for alternatives. Cruising was not at the top of the list, surprisingly. We seriously explored moving to New Zealand. New Zealand is in the midst of a brain drain as most of its young educated people move elsewhere, primarily Australia. Because of this brain drain, IT workers (and especially network engineers) wanting to move into the country are on somewhat of a fast track approval.
We went so far as to tell our families we were moving to live the life of Kiwis… but what was the life of a Kiwi? Our primary motivation was to reprioritize our lives away from what is fake and towards what is real. We started talking to people from New Zealand to get a feel for what life there really is all about. We would still need to work full time, if only to keep our fast track status. Slowly, we figured out that the freedom we were searching for doesn’t have as much to do with “where” as with “when” and “what” you are doing. Time-freedom is hard to come by. Cruising fulfills both aspects of what drove Michele and I to want to move to New Zealand: time-freedom and exploration. The ability to set sail within a few hours notice for whatever port you would like definitely is quite alluring for the both of us. The time-freedom to explore those ports, as well as ourselves, is what calls us to the sea.
This post is part of our NaBloPoMo series. Follow the Horizon is participating in National Blog Post Month (NaBloPoMo). NaBloPoMo is for bloggers who commit to post each day in the month of May.
by Dan | May 3, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Good bye awesome car
Yesterday was a sad day in the life of my car ownership… I just sold the best car that I will ever own (previously of My Car and I went Diving fame). Car ownership and cruising don’t exactly go hand in hand, do they? Let me say that I like cars. I like driving, I like racing (not NASCAR, that doesn’t make sense to me), etc… I had a Saab 9-3 Aero with a 6 speed manual transmission. The engine was V6 Turbo Charged. That’s 276 screaming horse power in a sedan. I actually never lost a race, even against BMWs, Mercedes, Porches, Corvettes, and other less worthy challengers.
Hello future
It just wasn’t to be, however. Finance guru Michele figured out that we could save an additional $13,000 before our cast off if we traded my car for a cheaper one that we paid cash for. That $13,000 is around a year’s worth of expenses while cruising. Needless to say a year cruising the ocean beats a year cruising my 9-3 Aero to work any day… but it was still hard to drive off the lot leaving it behind. It is one thing to know and understand that following our dreams will require us to get rid of pretty much everything we own, but its another thing altogether to put those words into action. It’s bittersweet. I feel awesome that Michele was able to figure out how to save an additional year’s worth of expenses without needing to wait any longer before we cast off.
We now have one major To-Do List item checked off: pay off one of our car loans. We plan on doing the same with our other Saab 9-3 (yes, we used to own two…) in the future, but paying cash for our new GMC Jimmy kind of knocked our savings down temporarily. We will probably get nearly all of what we paid for the GMC back when we sell it, but we don’t have the cash to buy another car immediately. One car payment down, one to go, and a future to look forward to. Follow your dreams. Follow the Horizon.
by Dan | Apr 7, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Kayaks are one of the early purchases
Michele and I have been wondering, “What should we buy now for cruising later?,” as well as its reciprocal, “What should we hold off on buying for cruising later?” These questions are more complicated and nuanced than at first thought.
The cruising community is great! There are so many cruising families willing to share their hard earned wisdom with us. One of these is the family of the S/V Totem. Behan of S/V Totem is detailing what people in the planning stage can buy early that will help later when they start cruising. Perfect for Michele and I!
So far Behan has covered books, personal gear, and water stuff (she calls it games… scuba is more than a game for me!). I really took note of part three of her series when she talks about scuba gear. I had incorrectly assumed the gear would be cheaper in the tropics due to so many more people being involved in scuba versus Illinois. I just bought a SCUBA set that I will use to become an instructor as well as while we are cruising. Before reading her post, I had assumed SCUBA gear would be cheaper in the tropics.
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| Taken during our recent trip to Shedd Aquarium. Can you ID it? |
As a scuba diver I would also recommend fish identification books. One of the best is Reef Fish Identification: Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas which is obviously for Florida, Caribbean, and Bahamas. Paul Humann has many other books as well for the different regions of the world. Fish identification books will be great as Carter begins to explore the colorful depths with us… the ocean will be our classroom.
Behan’s list will help Michele and I as we canvas garage sales and clearance aisles between now and cast-off. Having lists like hers lets us know what is OK to buy when we see a great deal and what is best to wait to purchase.
by Michele | Mar 28, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So, last night I was getting a glass of water for myself after dinner from our refrigerator. We have an ice maker which has a dispenser on the freezer door for our “convenience”. The problem is that it actually isn’t very convenient at all. In fact, I stood at my freezer door for a good thirty seconds and had exactly 3 pieces of ice plop into my glass. I realized, as I was standing there dehydrating, that it would have been significantly faster to just open the freezer door and scoop the ice out manually. The funny thing is, our ice dispenser has been this slow for the last 4 years, and I still continue to sit and wait for each piece of ice to make its way into my glass.
This got me thinking about the illusion of convenience. How much time and money do we spend for something to be more convenient, when it would have been faster and easier to do it the “hard” way? Our dishwasher is another good example: I completely clean off all of my dishes in the sink before I put them in the dishwasher because I don’t trust it to wash my dishes properly. Then what is the point of the appliance I continue to use every day?
Sometimes it’s just too easy to get suckered into the marketing tactics that say the newest gadget will help you save time because we agree with the basic assumption. You need more stuff to deal with the fact that you don’t have enough time. Personally, I know I don’t have enough time, that’s why I want to get rid of the stuff.
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.