No home, no jobs and a dying car!

We moved to a new stage in our preparation to the departure. Sooner this month we left the house and last Friday was our last day at work. Last week we sold the Nissan and we now have only the Plymouth Breeze to move about. The only issue is that the Breeze is almost falling apart and we just cross our fingers that it last until our departure in a week and half.

With all these earthly belongings separated from us we should now feel light and free! No way!! We are not Tibetan monks; we are capitalists who enjoyed a nice and comfortable life for many years! We are now realizing that there will be no steady revenues anymore and feel more like “Oh God, what have we done?” than floating in our “freedom”. But hey, that’s what it takes and we’ll deal with it.

This week we are in Montreal to say goodbye to families and friends and next week we will go to the boat for the final preparation and supply.

Danielle and I would like to take a minute to express our gratitude to everyone who in the past weeks helped us and supported us. Many people spontaneously offered their time or give us generous gifts for our departure and we sincerely appreciate it. In the rush of meeting everyone we feel we didn’t express enough our gratitude so now we do it. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Our goal is to go and sail around the world. Obviously, since we never did this before we may or may not complete it. As we go through the trip we will have a much better assessment of what it means in terms of effort. But hey, if we don’t try we will never know don’t we?

So now the preparation of the trip is reaching the end. Remember that this trip doesn’t start when the boat leaves the dock but really started in January 2008 when we seriously started taking irrevocable actions for the trip. Like any significant projects we started by making lists of things to do and we were quite surprised by the sheer number of things to do. Telling you everything Danielle and I went through would require at least 7 pages of text so I’ll summarize.

Basically, the last nine months were filled with ordering boat parts, changing addresses, renewing our passports, getting married, selling the house, installing equipments on the boat, getting our diesel generator installed, selling everything in the house and getting vaccinated for all diseases that have a vaccine for and all this while working full time OUF!

If this trip is a vacation we will need a good year of it just to recover from the preparation! Danielle now has the endurance of a bowl of Jello and I am ready to surrender my kingdom for a day without planning something or calling someone to get something done. Oups, Danielle is looking at me with round eyes. Ok then, she has the endurance of a bowl of Jello from a Chinese buffet, which we know is so firm that it can be used as a substitute for plumbing mastic or pads under the table legs. I always believed that this kind of Jello was patented by 3M but I am sure the company will deny it.

But Hey! When the going gets though we tell ourselves that all these efforts and sacrifices are for a good cause. You know, such as storms, small quarters, tropical heat. . . . Hey I am just kidding! This is going to be great, really and we know it. Now that the house is sold and all our personal belongings are either on the boat or in storage at some relatives and friends then we can now smell the breeze of the ocean calling. Or I should say, the breeze of Lake Ontario since our first heading will be Lake Ontario to a small town called Oswego.

In Oswego starts the Erie Canal, which leads to the Hudson River and eventually to New-York City. We will follow the East coast of USA down to Florida for eventually crossing the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas.

For the remaining of the itinerary you will have to follow our “adventures” on this web site. Remember that you can click on the “Where are we” button to see our latest position or the “Contact us” to send us an email. The “Video” button takes you to the Vimeo website where we post our video and the “Picture” button takes you to the Flickr web site where we post our picture.

Danielle and I sincerely hope you will enjoy reading our posts, which should be updated more or less monthly or more often if we have easy internet access.

Sanding