When you take a step back and look at this whole plan it’s easy to become overwhelmed and feel like you want throw your hands up in the air and give up. I believe that is EXACTLY why 99% of the population that attempts to plan on cruising simply never go. For someone like me who is very impatient and likes to have things exactly the way I want them and right now, it’s even more difficult. I keep reading people who’s sage advice is simply, “Just go!” and thinking that is easy to say for many situations. Truth be told, cruising is not free, albeit not terribly expensive and much cheaper than almost anyone would believe. Having said that, “just going” does not alleviate the debt accumulated. The solution for that is hard work and time. Ok, so I’m fine with the hard work part, but the time part is what gets me (read “impatient” a few sentences back). I like to embrace life and do the dreams. Not just sit back and dream about the dreams and what would we do if we were doing the dream. If you’re going to so something, do it. Right? Yet again, my personality is at odds with reality. Which makes me even more fit to be a cruiser. Ack. I’m so sick of the status quo and running through life with the rest of the herd. Ok, enough ranting and raving about my impatience with reality.
This past weekend we took some more first steps towards simplifying our lives and relinquishing “stuff” in preparation for living in a more confined space than this enormous landlubber abode. We went through the attic, closets, garage, dressers, everything. We cleaned out and eliminated unnecessary stuff that we did not need in the immediate future or that belonged to someone else and we need to return. We had a garage sale and although garage sales are such beatings, it went well. I now know exactly what is in the garage and more importantly WHERE in the garage things are. We put what was left, the items we need for now, in their place and organized everything. Now we can actually get in and out of the cars in the garage without tripping over stuff or hitting our heads on stuff. Bonus: we make a ton of cash. I can’t imagine how much we’ll make when we do our final garage sale prior to moving on the boat. Now that is exciting, to us anyway. Wish I had more exciting news for y’all other than this blah, blah, blah minutiae.
I totally agree with the first paragraph; I’m the same way. We had a life-induced delay last year that drove me bonkers. Looks like we’re finally leaving next year. Finally.
The second paragraph makes me laugh. When we were in a land house, only 1200 sq ft, we did quarterly purges, and were all proud of ourselves for all the stuff we didn’t have. Then we moved aboard, and after being on the boat for three years, we’re *still* getting rid of stuff. You’ve never purged enough. New stuff tries to come aboard. Old stuff sticks around. You think you might need an extra whatever someday… it’s a neverending battle. *especially* when you have kids.
We ran across an article about minimizing. I’ll add it to my next post. Some of it a bit more extreme than we plan on but the concept is the same. All in all I’d love to pair down everything to a few suitcases. Take Pat & Ali Schulte (http://www.bumfuzzle.com) who along with their daughter Ouest can move across country with all of their belongings to move onto a boat via a single flight. Now that’s where I would like to be!