Have you ever taken a trip to someplace new? How long did you stay? What if you lived on a trip for months? This has become our way of life at this point. We are continuing our series with Dharam Barrett”s article: “How To Get Your Life Back On Track When You Feel Broken” as our framework for evaluating this process of getting ourselves back on track after massive changes in our life happened in June 2016. Part 1 is about doing something that flat out scares you. Part 2 is about unplugging from the digital world so you can experience the moments that are happening all around you right now. Part 3 is about learning a new language. Part 4 is Barrett’s number 6: Take a trip. The premise is that changing your surroundings can help you find a place of healing by entering into the new scene. The trip can be any length you desire.

What has our trip looked like? Just read the blog! In summary, we purchased our sailboat in August 2016, loaded it up and sailed it from the San Francisco Bay area to San Diego, CA. Once in San Diego we made improvements, repairs and provisions. We left San Diego for La Paz BCS, Mexico on November 21, 2016. We hung out at a marina and beach club there for about 2.5 months finishing up varnish and minor repairs. We pulled out of La Paz February 19, 2017 to sail around the Sea of Cortez as far north as Loreto BCS, Mexico.

The trip was stellar! We anchored in amazing turquoise waters, enjoyed amazing geology, and frolicked with wild sea life! We interacted with small communities in our different anchorages and met amazing people from the local area and beyond. We experimented with our different boat systems such as water, power, and garbage/sewage while honing our boat handling and anchoring skills. This time has been challenging, rich, and nearly beyond words. We have a great deal of content for the blog that will be coming soon!

We returned to La Paz for a week long stay in the yards, which means hauling the boat out of the water to inspect the bottom. This included new bottom paint, new zincs, and a delimitation repair that was a surprise. Once back in the water we provisioned for a month and waited for the right weather window to return to San Diego, at least start the process of our return.

The uphill return to San Diego, CA, about 1,000 nautical miles took 19 days and was grueling. This sort of traveling reveals a great deal about how tough you are and how tough your boat is! We arrived in San Diego on Easter morning about 0415 tying up at the customs dock to await our check in. 

In all our trip was 5 months long. We have been back for about five days and things feel so different. We have truly returned as different persons. There is so much to share and so many stories to tell. As we prepare to return to our house in northern California, our views are so majorly different. The life that we once had feels foggy in my head and our losses don’t seem so large. I still have questions about what will be next and what we have become from our adventures, but my heart is so much more peaceful and whole than when we left in August.

Living on a trip has been a major healing force in our lives. Even though our suitcase is 35 feet long, it has been the trip of a lifetime. Now that we are back, we think we need a bigger suitcase so we can have others along next time we travel taking the next trip of a lifetime. Never underestimate the power of a trip, a very long trip, to places you have never been. Barrett’s supposition is quite true in this, we do see ourselves differently now. 

We are including our Mexico wrap up video with this entry so you can hear about some of the things we learned, what we wish we had on our trip, what we could not live without and more!

Many of you may be thinking, "I'd like to do that someday." Whether it's actually sailing off into the sunset like us or getting a hunting lodge in the mountains or the equivalent dream, things like this don't just happen. Opportunity + preparation = luck.

Preparation looks like changing our mindsets, living differently than others and swimming upstream. For starters, we decided many years ago to not go into debt for anything but a house. Thanks to some great resources on financial freedom by my friend Stephen DeSilva called Prosperous Soul. Then we started to downsize our life. We moved from a 3,500 sq ft rental house to a 1,750 sq ft rental. Two of our four children moved away to college, so we did not need the room. We bought our cars cash, used. The last one we purchased new was a company car in 2005. Which means you are always in a car that is not amazing, but a tool for getting from one place to another. No bluetooth, nav screens or other bells and whistles. We started to reduce our footprint in a lot of ways. We would save up to buy a side of grass-fed beef for $4.58 lb for any cut; so hamburger was $2-3 less per pound when you buy weekly, a fillet minion was 1/3 the price. You get the picture.

If you've ever played the game Cash-flow, the object of the game is to get your passive income to exceed your monthly expenses, then you can leave the rat-race and pursue your dreams.

Sailing is a very green way to live and travel. I know I can hear you saying, "boat stands for: Break Out Another Thousand!" Well, they don't have to. We looked for boats that were older, well built and were below the magical 40' length. Every single cost on a boat is directly related to the length. In fact, most marinas, boat yards or services base their sliding scale from 0-39' is $X per foot, 40-50' is $X+25% per foot and if you own a 50+ foot boat, you're paying more than double of what I am per foot. There is a 55' motor yacht on the end of our dock in La Paz, it's paying for an 80' end-tie at a much higher cost per foot than us. The parts, paint, varnish, engine, mast, sails etc. are all exponentially more expensive the bigger you go. A winch on our boat is pretty big, but the next size up is twice the cost. So, like our cars, we are not turning heads when we pull into ports, but we can anchor alongside boats worth a ten thousand times more than us while enjoying the same view; actually ours would be nicer since we're looking at their yacht and they're looking at ours.

​Sailing, using only the wind is very economical too. You just need enough food and water to live through the crossing of any ocean in the world. 30-45 days is a typical long crossing. If you have patience and moderate skill, you can go anywhere you want to in the sea. 

Someday...when is that? It's not a day of the week, it's kinda like tomorrow. Opportunity was before us, we had both lost our jobs at the same time. We could have freaked out and hunkered down. Instead we saw the hand of Providence orchestrating our lives, knowing that He is good and has only good things for us, so we asked the question, "Why not now?" I started looking at boats that would be solid, blue-water boats (Capable of crossing an ocean without breaking or sinking) not coastal cruisers with fin keels bolted on and spade rudders. Keels do fall off and rudders break when subject to the constant gyrations of a large sea. When I found the one we have now, it was more than I budgeted for, so I sold my car and cashed in some gold to make up the difference. It's about balancing assets and liabilities. We had some assets that we could part with for this season.

A lot of our blog entries, Instagram and Facebook posts are about freedom. So many people sacrifice freedom for security. Security provided from a job is worth the lack of freedom on a day-to-day basis, right? I described my life as 'living on rails' or "I feel like a slot-car" no deviation, just faster than the previous lap. Days turn into months and years go by, all the while you are serving, working and building something. Maybe it's yours, maybe it's the company's. One of the previous owners of our boat could not break free to do what we're doing, they owned a business that they could not offload due to the financial crisis. Maybe you lost that job that seemed so secure, the big company with your pension was bought-out or collapsed. So security is not so secure. Freedom is such a big deal, people bleed for it, risk their lives getting to freedom or become refugees in order to get out from under oppressive governments. People will always desire to be free. It's no coincidence that we spent two months of our 30th anniversary on a boat called Living Free and ours is called New Adventures. 

The dream remains a dream until you wake up. 

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