“If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” – Paulo Coelho
We started months ago trying to downsize and clean out the closets. Now that we actually have to be out of our house it feels never-ending and like we still have SO MUCH STUFF. We have made so many trips to donate our things and have listed many on craigslist. Lastly we plan to have a moving/garage sale to get rid of the rest and hopefully make a buck in the process.
We are shipping some stuff to Vieques, Puerto Rico to be temporarily stored at my mother in laws house. We have a half built house on the island that we plan to finish over the long term. We have a lot of building materials for the house that we are shipping and a few other things we want to keep. And we are planning to ship our vehicles as well. We are moving the rest of our stuff aboard Nauti Mermaid.
It has been helpful that we have been moving little by little while we were out on the hard and now are bringing stuff aboard via “pickle” our dinghy. It has been easier to find a place for things and not be completely overwhelmed doing this little by little.
But basically this all adds up to we are not sailing. We have been non-stop working on wrapping things up. And still feels like there is so much more to do.
We have been working on various boat jobs and ordering things like SOLAR panels!!!! Woohoo! I’m very excited about those. We have been doing maintenance on both of the motors and Tomas fixed the STOP switch on the port side panel. It has not been working since we left St. Augustine and it was a real pain in the ass to use the emergency kill switch on the back of the motor every time we needed to power down.
We are staying on the boat on anchor while getting fully moved out of our house. It has been good to get acquainted with her in the water and having her unhooked from shore power to see how well she stays charged (thus the solar panels). And of course we are continually doing projects in whatever spare moments we have between moving and care-taking of the little ones.
We are feeling very stressed trying to juggle so many different pieces of the puzzle and just the move alone was emotional and stressful. But we know there are new adventures to come and change can always be a bit scary but as Mark Twain said “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
In the chaos of it all, a side note is that Oliver needed to get his rabies vaccine updated and I over looked the timing in the juggling of all we had going on. So in order for him to travel with us through the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos there are very specific regulations that I’m not sure we will be able to meet in our time frame. So Oliver and our cats may have to be babysat and then flown to us in PR once we have arrived.