The Boat Dream [#1]

We divulged plans for our 180 life-turn slowly.

…little hints here and there to our closest friends and family. Words like “someday” and “eventually” described a distant timeline for a vague Boat Dream. We sprinkled wild declarations like “when you spend a week with us in French Polynesia, you’ll never want to go home,” and “save your vacation time to dive with us in the Galapagos” throughout conversations.

At first, everyone chuckled at our seemingly random visions of sand, surf, and sails. Until one day, a few of our near and dears realized those visions seemed to have a bit more clarity than they’d realized and maybe weren’t actually so random after all.

They were right.

For 20 years, before we were married, before we had children, before we had more than two nickels to rub together, John and I knew — like deep in our souls knew — we would one day sail around the world. As dating became marriage and marriage rolled into parenthood, we continued to idealize our Boat Dream. It didn’t always shine brightly like the beacon at the forefront of our goals checklist we’d planned it to be. It faded at times — promotions and paychecks and big moves and intensely glorious friendships all served to root us deeper into a pretty spectacular life on land.

But then, those same anchors on land became reasons we could actually go: paychecks were nice — we took vacations and had the ability to collect things; we had magnificent friendships we treasured like the rare gems they were. But things stopped being exciting and those same friendships we couldn’t imagine leaving behind we now trusted were deep enough to withstand our physical absence.

And so, we did it. We stopped talking in circles and started planning.

We bought books. We Googled. We started working toward becoming dive masters; we bought dive gear. In the handful of days after closing on the sale of our house, we put an offer on a boat in Maryland we’d never seen in person, said what felt like 10,000 tragic goodbyes, and drove 2,200 miles east to find our floating dream home.

By all definitions, our plan was reckless.

(Though, in fairness, there’s really no sane and entirely logical way to launch this plan.) Considering I’d personally fantasized about the Boat Dream for over 30 years, the handful of months of full blown sprinter’s-paced chaos it took to finally breathe life into this beast, were none short of shocking, exhausting, unnerving, terrifying, and entirely exhilarating.

But it’s finally here and we’re ready for the ride.