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, 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:

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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.

At the dock, so not the best of photos.
At the dock, so not the best of photos.

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.

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