Ok, on to the nitty gritty. Brenda and I are not really philosophical people. Once we decide, we do. We move forward. Immer geradeaus gehen. I am going to gloss over some of the angst and thought to give some of the answers we found and are using.
Those of you who have known me for a long time cannot say you are truly surprised that I want to 'freak and blow' on a boat. I have been at least a little interested in the idea since I was in high school. It was all just dreaming at the time, though. Now my wife and I had actually decided that we wanted to do it. That is different.
Being the successful over 40 responsible parents of two that we are, we did not just rush right out and go. We decided to do educate ourselves and see how the idea developed within ourselves before we committed. Witness, if you will, this blog post. It has been around nine months since we started this journey, and I am just now comfortable going public about it. There has been a lot of research and thinking over the last nine months.
I dug up and dusted off all the 'research' that I could remember regarding the sailing life. What kind of boat did we think we would like? What is it like out there for the families that are there now? Will the kids like it? How do we educate them? We spent days of time off during the winter on the web looking for info. This is what we found.
First, there are a LOT of people out there with families, and many of them write blogs that you can find on the web. They are all ages and so are their children. I'll give you two examples. Ceilydh Set Sail is a family of three who have been out sailing since 2009. They started in Vancouver and are now in Australia. Windtraveler is a younger couple who have been out for a while. They had a daughter while out cruising, and are now getting ready to go back out with new twins. Probably a little more gung ho than I am, but who am I to judge. They started in Chicago moving toward the Caribbean. Anyway, we found a great deal of first hand reporting available, which was encouraging.
We looked long and hard before we came up with a solution for schooling. The traditional answer is 'unschooling' your kids while you are away. Children are natural sponges when it comes to learning. Left to their own devices they will soak up the information available to them. Given the above mentioned over 40 responsible parenthood of us both, that seemed a little unstructured. While I am not going into all the options, beleive me there are several different levels, ranging from simple lesson plan templates to full online classrooms. Our basically serious nature caused us to lean toward the structured end of those options. We found an institution that fit our needs in Vermont. Oak Meadow Academy provides a full curriculum for all grades through high school, and is an accredited private school. It is used by members of the foreign service, military servicemen and women and other overseas personnel as well as regular distance learning parents in this country. It also appeals to us as one of the few real online/distance educational institutions that is not religion based. That is very important to both of us.
So far we have been very pleased with our choice. We withdrew the children from their schools this past fall and began teaching them here. Alex is in 8th grade with 9th grade Algebra and is doing well. Anna is in 5th grade, but is doubling up her math to go into and finish 6th grade math by the end of this year. We felt that starting this now would give both the us and the children a good chance to get this right before we add to it by moving around full time. Like I said, it is going well. Both children enjoy getting up late and doing their work in their pajamas. Brenda serves as schoolmaster and tutor wherever needed. Alex is mostly independent, doing his work on Google Docs and turning his assignments in every two weeks to his teacher, who is a retired instructor with thirty years experience at an all boys private school in Massachusetts. Anna works well, if a little less independently. She also turns her lessons in every two weeks, but Brenda is much more active in her teaching. The curriculum is actually more rigorous than we had expected. As an example, Anna has fifteen lessons in her Science textbook to complete this week, including starting a three week experiment in burying various items in soil to see what the effects are. I can't wait to dig up three week old lettuce to find out what happened. The focus is on real, concrete learning.
That was the first real step to going. Now it seems real. Other things happened along the way, mostly dealing with the whole 'how will we all deal with being on a boat and can we really do it?' fear. That will have to wait for the next post.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Friday, September 26, 2014
moving on
I have spent the last few days writing the sequel to my last post. It has ranged from a rant and rage against the machine diatribe to a cool clinical timeline of what we thought about and why. After going through it over and again, I have decided that what happened next doesn't really matter. Don't get me wrong. It matters to us. I just don't really think it matters to say it out loud here.
Suffice to say that there was a great deal of angst and energy in the discussion about what to do with the realization that we felt we needed to change something major in our lives. After several days we decided that the feelings we had were legitimate, and within a few weeks we had come up with a basic 'plan' of how we wanted to redraw our lives.
We decided to take advantage of the fact that I am able to retire in 2015 after working for the FAA for 25 years. It means a rather drastic pay cut, but it also means freedom to spend time together as a family and set our own schedule and pace. We want to be able to show our children the vast differences and wonders of the world, which is something that we can only do if we have the time to spend travelling. We both have a certain wanderlust that chafes when tied to one place too long. We both want to allow that free rein for a while. To go and see whatever we want to go and see, just for the sake of doing it. The rest of the plan really started to fall together once we agreed on that much. After all, once you decide to go do something, the rest is just the details of how you get there and what happens along the way.
The only way to travel full time on the kind of budget that we will have is to cut completely loose and carry your house with you, like a turtle. No one I know can afford to travel by plane, train and automobile full time, staying in hotels wherever you go. It just costs too much for more than a week or two. If you travel in (or with) your home, that becomes easier. While there may be limitations to where you can go, or to how fast you can get there, the overall cost drops dramatically. The big trade is that your house gets MUCH smaller and a lot more basic. Not outhouse basic, but pretty sparse.
We only found two practical options for this type of travel lifestyle. Travel by RV or travel by boat. Both of these have their merits. Brenda and I spent a fair amount of time looking at RVs, thinking that staying on land might be the better choice. Ultimately we found the space constraints too restrictive and the operating costs too high. Even the biggest 40-45' Class A diesel motorhomes only really have one bedroom. The kids would wind up in bunk beds that were along a hall Pullman style, like the old sleeper trains. It was enough, but not what we wanted. The amenities were nice though: air conditioning, two TVs and some really nice interiors. In the end two things caused us to rule them out. First was the operating expenses. These things are actually not that bad to buy, especially if you buy used. However, 8-10 mpg gets expensive when you are moving full time, not to mention the upkeep on the vehicle and the cost of places to stay/park whenever you decide to stop for a week/month/season. The second issue was actually bigger. In an RV you are limited to travel within the US and Canada. There are many beautiful places in those two countries, and we have by no means seen even a small portion. We want to be able to go other places: South America, Europe, maybe Africa or India. We may not get there, but we want to make sure we have the option, and travel by RV doesn't give us that. If we are building a new life for the dream, we want the full dream......all of it.
That left travel by boat. That is what we have decided to do. The tradeoffs are very different and the lifestyle is an even bigger change from our current way of life. We think we have worked through those issues, or at least most of them. That will be the topic for the next several posts. There was only one little drawback to sailing off into the sunset. I have never sailed a boat bigger than 35', mostly on lakes and protected water. Brenda has never sailed at all. The kids have never even been on a boat. How do we feel about that? Can we do it? How will we do it? What will the children think? Just a little nervous over here.
All in good time. Next I'll write about how we answered most of those questions. Then I'll start talking about the things we have learned and what we intend to do to get ready. I still have that other post. Maybe one day I'll post it. For now I think it's best to move on.
Suffice to say that there was a great deal of angst and energy in the discussion about what to do with the realization that we felt we needed to change something major in our lives. After several days we decided that the feelings we had were legitimate, and within a few weeks we had come up with a basic 'plan' of how we wanted to redraw our lives.
We decided to take advantage of the fact that I am able to retire in 2015 after working for the FAA for 25 years. It means a rather drastic pay cut, but it also means freedom to spend time together as a family and set our own schedule and pace. We want to be able to show our children the vast differences and wonders of the world, which is something that we can only do if we have the time to spend travelling. We both have a certain wanderlust that chafes when tied to one place too long. We both want to allow that free rein for a while. To go and see whatever we want to go and see, just for the sake of doing it. The rest of the plan really started to fall together once we agreed on that much. After all, once you decide to go do something, the rest is just the details of how you get there and what happens along the way.
The only way to travel full time on the kind of budget that we will have is to cut completely loose and carry your house with you, like a turtle. No one I know can afford to travel by plane, train and automobile full time, staying in hotels wherever you go. It just costs too much for more than a week or two. If you travel in (or with) your home, that becomes easier. While there may be limitations to where you can go, or to how fast you can get there, the overall cost drops dramatically. The big trade is that your house gets MUCH smaller and a lot more basic. Not outhouse basic, but pretty sparse.
We only found two practical options for this type of travel lifestyle. Travel by RV or travel by boat. Both of these have their merits. Brenda and I spent a fair amount of time looking at RVs, thinking that staying on land might be the better choice. Ultimately we found the space constraints too restrictive and the operating costs too high. Even the biggest 40-45' Class A diesel motorhomes only really have one bedroom. The kids would wind up in bunk beds that were along a hall Pullman style, like the old sleeper trains. It was enough, but not what we wanted. The amenities were nice though: air conditioning, two TVs and some really nice interiors. In the end two things caused us to rule them out. First was the operating expenses. These things are actually not that bad to buy, especially if you buy used. However, 8-10 mpg gets expensive when you are moving full time, not to mention the upkeep on the vehicle and the cost of places to stay/park whenever you decide to stop for a week/month/season. The second issue was actually bigger. In an RV you are limited to travel within the US and Canada. There are many beautiful places in those two countries, and we have by no means seen even a small portion. We want to be able to go other places: South America, Europe, maybe Africa or India. We may not get there, but we want to make sure we have the option, and travel by RV doesn't give us that. If we are building a new life for the dream, we want the full dream......all of it.
That left travel by boat. That is what we have decided to do. The tradeoffs are very different and the lifestyle is an even bigger change from our current way of life. We think we have worked through those issues, or at least most of them. That will be the topic for the next several posts. There was only one little drawback to sailing off into the sunset. I have never sailed a boat bigger than 35', mostly on lakes and protected water. Brenda has never sailed at all. The kids have never even been on a boat. How do we feel about that? Can we do it? How will we do it? What will the children think? Just a little nervous over here.
All in good time. Next I'll write about how we answered most of those questions. Then I'll start talking about the things we have learned and what we intend to do to get ready. I still have that other post. Maybe one day I'll post it. For now I think it's best to move on.
Monday, September 22, 2014
not fulfilling enough
December 2013. Sometime between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Brenda and I were sitting quietly, reflecting on the year gone by. We talked about ourselves. We talked about the kids. We went over Alex's baseball and orchestra. We discussed Anna's newfound love of gymnastics, her volleyball and her piano lessons. We talked about our house; how the maintenance was getting excessive and the roof was going to need replacing soon. The pool expenses probably outweighed the benefits of having it. The kids didn't seem to play in it much, etc. We talked about the fact that we would have to move whenever I retired, since the taxes and operating costs would be too high to afford on my reduced pay. We weren't planning on me retiring soon, just talking about what would happen 'someday'. We talked about saving more money and working to get ready to pay for college, since it was only five years away. We had some money saved up, but probably not enough. We discussed the schools that Alex and Anna were in. How they met our expectations, or didn't, with regards to our children's education. We thought that the schools were probably going to get the kids ready to go to college, but maybe weren't doing a good job teaching them how to succeed in life. We talked about anything and everything. Then we both sat quietly, just thinking about it all.
We were discussing the strain of trying to give two kids everything and the best start possible. Talking about wanting to keep enough time and/or money for ourselves that we could enjoy life, too. Looking at how we spent all our time running from one set piece activity to another, never really getting to spend time with each other or our children. It seemed we went places to watch our kids do things, but never got to be with them outside of the car. We complained that we were too busy going from one place to the next; we could never just be. We looked back on our own lives. Our parents had worked hard to give us a chance at the lives we were leading. They skrimped and saved so that we would grow up in good neighborhoods, go to good schools. Our parents helped us be involved in the things that we were interested in, whether it was music, sports or anything else. We always came first in their eyes. They made sure we got the best education possible, so that we would have the best start to our adult lives. We had both accepted this and done very well. We were both successful. We had great kids and a great life. While we recognized that we were repeating the cycle with our own children, we thought we were doing an even better job of it than our parents. We were set up to start our kids down the road of life with a better start than we had. The same road we were walking. The same road our parents walked with us. I don't remember if I said it first, or if Brenda did. We were sitting, thinking again. One of us said, 'This life is not fulfilling enough for me to want my children to live it again.'
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