So, it is with some surprise that after 5 months of traveling by plane, car and other people’s boats, I am finding living on my boat, in a dusty boat yard, in Fiji’s tropical heat to be a relief. Tension that I didn’t know was there is seeping out of me. Apparently, even for someone traveling full time, traveling without my “snail shell” is tiring.
I am home. My home is a mess and she isn’t her finest as a living space while buried in a keel pit, but still, I am home.
We had so many cool experiences, of such variation in type, over the last 5 months that I still find myself sifting through the memories and trying to fit them together into a coherent narrative.
We had our two months living in a tree house on a private island in Tonga, kiteboarding ourselves silly and playing with other people’s dogs.
We had two months vagabonding around New Zealand. During that time, we were hosted by three cruising friends. Luckness showed us the Bay of Islands. Nomad showed us Great Barrier Island and part of South Island. Dream Time showed us Waiheke. We also were able to visit with the crews of Nyon, Bravo and Celestial.
We traveled by bus, by rental car, in our friends’ van, hitch hiking, by ferry and we slept more than half of those two months in our trusty tent which finally fell apart and was left in NZ. We rock climbed on both North and South Island and my oh my it felt so good to be back on the rock.
Then I went to see my family whom I missed dearly, two childhood friends, and ran out of time, and frankly energy, to manage to see anyone else.
So now I’m back and somehow returning to the boat makes me feel like writing again. We are taking the day off of boat projects today. We’ve had a great run of ticking projects off the list. It’s been a very productive haul out and we expect to spend another week in the pit, a week on the stands and put Estrellita back in the water by the end of the month.
FIJI – here we come!
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