September 23, 2016: Houston, Texas

Fall is here, and hurricane season ends in a few weeks, so we're heading back to La Peregrina.  

We came back to the states in July, since it is unwise to sail during hurricane season.  It's been a great summer.  What a treat to see family and tribe again!  We visited Jade in Houston, Mom and Julie and Cameron in Pittsburgh, Molly in Denver, and many wonderful friends in Tennessee and Colorado.  We are enormously grateful to everyone who provided a bed, meals, cocktails, and storage space.  Regrettably, we didn't get to the Carolinas as we had hoped.  We visited the doctors and the dentist.  We helped Molly move from Denver into her new apartment in East Nashville.  It was a busy time, and we loved it.

I spent much of the summer hiking the Colorado Trail, the 500 mile walk from Denver to Durango.  It was a little more solitary tha I had expected, and a little harder on the old man's body.  On the very first day out, I tripped on my own shoelaces, fell on my face, and then brandished a beautiful black eye for the next two weeks.  I was charged by a moose, but managed to scare her off (probably the black eye did it.)  I got stuck on a high ridge in a lightning storm, hunkered down in willows in the cold rain.  But mostly it was just a whole lot of walking, up and down and up and down and up and down.   I met some fascinating people, and saw some spectacular scenery.  Here's a video:  

On September 21st, the last day of summer, Maribeth and I threw our backpacks into the back of the car and drove out of Nashville.  We've enjoyed spending the last couple days with Jade.  We're now at Houston Hobby airport awaiting our flight to Belize City.  Tomorrow we'll travel by bus, ferry, and water taxi and hopefully reach Rio Dulce, Guatemala late tomorrow evening.  We're anxious to see how La Peregrina has handled being closed up for three months in the humid tropics.  We have a little work to do on the boat, and we'd like to do some inland exploration of Guatemala.  But within a few weeks, we hope to be sailing again.

Don't forget, you are invited to come join us.  Let us know when or where you'd like to come, and we'll start working on the details.

Joe and Maribeth 

A Retrospective: The Plan

Way back in March, 2008, Maribeth and I decided to commit our plan to writing.  We called it "The Five Year Plan," but it reflected a plan we had first discussed three years earlier, and a dream we had been nurturing for nearly twenty years.   

As it turned out, of course, the plan didn't come to fruition until 2016.  And we ended up with a 34-foot Cabo Rico instead of a bigger boat.  ObamaCare solved our health insurance problem.  

Implementing the plan was terrifying, and we had many doubts along the way.  We realized we'd have to quit our jobs, which seemed irresponsible, even dangerous.  We began to call it “Our Year of Living Dangerously.”  But the years were flying by (still are) and we felt it was now or never.   

We're now three quarters of the way through our year.  By the criteria we set eight years ago, we're succeeding.  So far.  We've got a very few more months of sailing remaining, and then we must face the "get new job when back" part of the plan.  I think we'll be ready for it.