Hindsight is 2020
C and R, Betty Gail, Alton, MI
C: After embarking on this journey (the Loop) even though we have been married for 30 years, we are still learning things about each other.
R: part of that is because we have been changing in those 30 years but this concentrates the changes and adaptations.
We started this journey in 2020. We moved onboard this boat in November of 2020.
We closed on the boat in August 1st of 2020. She needed some work done and we started the journey in January of 2021.
R: I retired in 2019 and C retired in February of 2020 and we started to get ready to leave, and things were beginning to shut down and we were getting rid of our belongings etc and we had signed a contract with a renter. We ended up staying for a couple of months in the guest house, out back, allowing the renter to move into the house and that gave us some time to get things in order.
We did a practice camping trip to start just to see if we could move around camping and also as you would go into a different community, and it was obvious we were clearly traveling and we wanted to see how people reacted to us and also how we felt about being travelers, with COVID. And we felt—ok we can do this.
We camped our way across the country from Arizona to the east coast to get a boat. We stopped in Nebraska to see our moms.
Even searching for a boat, it was kind of perfect to deal with the Pandemic—you’re always outside and it easy to social distance and in retrospect, it was a perfect time to look for a boat.
You do understand it might strike people as odd when the news started to report that RV sales were just going crazy and also anybody shopping for boats quickly learned that sales were going crazy. Now having been on the boat for not quite a year and traveling on the boat and being marinas etc it is a good environment: seldom do we have people in the boat, usually you’re on the boat and someone is on the dock etc.
Our experience camping was great in acclimating ourselves to living on the boat. We still had way too many clothes with us, way too many things. It’s not so much how much you can live without, it’s more like how little do you actually need.
The saying one should collect experiences not things—is easy to say but actually doing this in life, and shedding lots of things, even things that you worked hard to get --- you just realize it’s just a “thing”: it’s one thing to ay it and know it but it’s another to actually embrace it and say Yes! I would rather be doing this.