The forecast for Downeast Maine is crummy with freezing rain for the start of our drive, but we’ll scoot south of it soon enough. Plus, the 25 hour ride in this overstuffed car is sure to make our new 34 foot home feel downright palatial!
Baby it’s cold outside- but not for long!
Six days and counting, and I had my first true ‘it’s time to get out of this tundra’ moment this week. Pumping gas in what seemed to be a high velocity wind tunnel/torture chamber sans gloves or hat one recent morning, I shed any feelings of winter-regret or sadness that I may have once had. I’m ready for warmth.
I’ve met with Lily’s teachers and have our plans in place, our med kit is assembled and organized, our Chart Kits arrived, I finished all sewing projects (which included throw pillows, mending of warm-weather clothing, and the gastrointestinal suturing of one stuffed tiger), and now we’re trying to figure out how to fit it all into the car. Which. Might. Not. Work.
To increase both the car load AND excitement level for all of us, I happened upon one of these, that led to the purchase of a second the next day:
Just weeks before, I had gone into TJ Maxx to find some home-ware trinket and thought to myself as I look at their display window “Who on earth would buy a kayak at TJ’s?!”. It’s the place for sheets and cheap clothing deals and sometimes shoes, but definitely not sporting goods. But, in the end, it turns out, it’s me who buys kayaks at TJ’s. Twice.
So. Now we add two kayaks to the ‘coffin’ already sitting on top of the car filled with lots and lots of stuff, and boom! The Squatlys go to Florida. My father is proud just picturing it.
Another set of goodies that arrived were the decals for the new name and hail port. See? 
Our next item ‘to do’ is to research the re-christening ceremony. I’m sure there’s rum involved, and I’m not sure if any of the other details are as important, so I’m guessing we’ll fare well for that oh-so-necessary task.
To leave you with some more visuals, here are some shots of the interior so that you can picture us bumping into each other all day long with more specificity.
Listy list lists.
Twelve days and counting until we shove off to drive south. Our first real snow storm of the season has kept us all cozy and happy for this long weekend, so I’m hoping that the girls can get their fill of sledding and snowman making (and snow-eating, in the case of Violet, who gazes out the window at the deck drooling over the potential mitten scoops of the stuff; I’m thinking of telling her that we have a faucet INside the house one of these days). It’s the one piece of real guilt that I’m harboring over this time away; our girls love the winters here in Maine. You know what though? They’ll be fine on white sand beaches, too. Right? (Right, of course, says the sensible me.)
While they have been outside, I have been busy making lists, completing tasks from lists, making sub-lists of lists, compiling lists, making mental lists when my hands are tied up checking things off of other lists, and then lying awake at night making lists of things that I only assume that I’ll forget to write down once I’m up again, which therefore sends me into a pneumonic list to remember the list. Holy cow, it’s time to get out of here.
Since a set of items on one of my lists included custom-fitting our linens to meet the wonky dimensional needs of our bunks, yesterday largely involved me wrestling yardage of elastic and cursing my sewing impatience while acting as ‘Principal’ to the kids playing school (not a self-appointed title, to be sure). At the same time Andy was checking a boating life skill learning experience off of his list by teaching himself to splice double braided line with the help of a fancy You Tube video. And just like that, a million hours later, and we have sheets that fit and a new traveller line! Evidence below:
For now though, the lists are calling.
The Details.
You have questions? (Wow, so do we…) But here are some answers for the easy ones.
BOAT? It’s a Catalina 34. It’s on the smaller side of what we were looking for, but it checked the boxes that we needed checked with its two staterooms, U-shaped dining space and roomy cockpit. Added bonuses are its hard-bottomed dinghy and outboard, solar panels, generator, and some pretty sweet plastic plates with daisies AND stripes.
NAME? Her name is currently Migration, but we will soon christen her Chickadee, to bring juuuust a bit more ‘Maine’ with us. Violet has a ‘pet’ chickadee that visits the bird feeder at her Montessori school every day who she’s named Stormy, so we went for the general instead of the specific, for fear of bad weather omens. (Truth be told, I was lobbying for the boat to be called Lilypad with The Shrinking Violet as the tender, but I fully grasped Andy’s inequity argument. Chickadee lives!)
WHERE? AND THEN WHERE? ‘Migratadee’ is currently in Indiantown, Florida, on the Okachobee waterway about 25 miles inland of Stuart. Our plan is to leave MDI on January 29, 2016 and drive to Florida as quickly as possible (it depends on how many hours straight we can push Andy to stay awake, as I’ll be happily sleeping for as many hours as I can!). From there we’ll hope that the contents of the car fit into the boat, add a few thousand other odds and ends, finish a few projects, and take off. The plan is to ‘hop’ over to the Abacos for the majority of our time, but our number one goal is to have fun and hook the girls on cruising, and if that means not finding a nearly perfect weather window to cross, than we’ll be just as happy cruising the Keys. Or 99% as happy anyway.
Wherever we end up, we’ll make our way back to Indiantown to haul out when we’re through at the end of March, button the old bird up (see what I did there with our new name?!) and drive home to the frozen, muddy tundra that is Maine in April. We’ll then spend the next ten months waiting for our next escape.
For now, however, this ‘To Take’ pile is growing as quickly as our lists are, so it’s time to shape some mattress pads.
Gearing up and counting down.
Well, we did it. After 10 years of dreaming, 2 years of boat shopping and countless boats on and off the ‘maybe’ lists, we closed on our first cruising boat last week! Now our countdown begins to gear ourselves up for what is hopefully to be the first of many winter cruising seasons as a family.
More details and updates to follow, so keep watch!