Perhaps we should talk about our “land life”.  It’s all well and good to buy a boat and plan to sail away, but there’s a whole lot of subtraction that has to happen along with the addition.  Like work, and house, and cars, and…stuff!

Yep, we’ve got stuff.  Now, in our minds, we didn’t have nearly the amount of stuff that a lot of people have-no storage units stuffed full, no basement crammed with who knows what.  And we can even fit both cars in our garage!  A lot of that is down to the “purges”.  About once a year, we go through and toss or give away stuff we no longer want.  And, when our kids moved out, we had a rule:  toss it or take it.  We’re not a storage unit.  But still, it’s America and we’ve been blessed with a pretty privileged life:  we’ve got stuff.

Kim and 3 of the furry members of her team

And then there’s work: careers, professions! Kim, as an employee, was pretty straightforward.  She could give her notice and walk away.  Not to say that’s easy.  As the Director of Child Life and Expressive Therapies, she directed a team of 50 people-a department that has more than doubled in size since she started.  She has a lot of herself invested in her team and what they’ve built together.

I, on the other hand, owned my practice.  I could, of course, just shutter it and walk away, but that seemed like abandoning all the families we serve, not to mention throwing my team out of work.  And in our small town, there aren’t a lot of pediatric care options around.  So I started calling around.  I called regional health systems and nearby practices but no one would even return my calls.  Then I heard about a national pediatric group that was expanding throughout the country.  I gave them a call and I was in luck:  they were interested.  Long story short, after lots of negotiation, we sealed a deal.  They bought me out.  I would stay on for a few  months while they hire someone to replace me.  And my whole team could stay.  Win-win!  And, since I own my building, they would pay me rent, giving us an income stream.  Win-win-win!!

Now, what about the actual “stuff”?  We basically had two choices:  unload it or store it.  I was in favor of unloading it.  Kim wanted to store it because (and she had a point), what if we decide we hate cruising after a year?  Then we’ll have to start over.  I couldn’t argue with that.  But, on a dollars and cents basis, it just didn’t make sense.  To rent the smallest storage unit just for our sentimental items and mementos, we would spend about $1200 per year.  To rent a unit for ALL of our stuff would cost us about $8,000 per year.  Plus we would have to hire movers to move it in and to move it out.  And, if we decide we like cruising and take off around the world, then we either keep paying or have to figure out how to sell off all our stuff from a storage unit-not very appealing.  Given our limited income while cruising, it just didn’t make sense.  Decision made:  we unload all of our stuff except for the mementos, which we store, and away we go.

And this is it! A 5 foot by 10 foot storage unit. And it’s not even full!

At this point, we started telling friends and family what we were planning.  We quickly learned the meaning of “blank stare”.  Most people just can NOT wrap their heads around this-giving up all of our stuff to live on a boat.  Who does that?  It’s not that our friends and family weren’t supportive, it’s that we could tell they just didn’t understand it.  And it does fly in the face of what most people spend their lives doing:  we work, accumulate stuff, save for retirement, then retire and enjoy the stuff.  But we came to realize that, for us, “stuff” was just…stuff.  We didn’t care about stuff.  We care about people and we wanted experiences.  That’s hard to explain.  Ah well.  Back to the boat…