And so it begins

Welcome to our new blog. 

We are going to document life aboard our new sailboat Shambala as we travel around the U.S. east coast, the Bahamas, and beyond(hopefully) over the next couple of years. We've have been talking about going cruising since we chartered a sailboat in Florida for our honeymoon 9 years ago and the dream is finally becoming reality.

We've sold pretty much everything we owned through garage sales and craigslist over the past six months and sold our house on August 27. We do have a storage unit for the important stuff but everything else is gone. We are currently living with our friend Kelly in her two bedroom condo where the kids share a bed and Staci and Paul sleep in the loft on an air mattress.

We've been looking seriously at boats since March and on August 29th Paul flew to Port Clinton,OH to look at one that we had made an offer on the previous week and was accepted. The boat is a 1987 Morgan 41 Classic that has only seen use on Lake Erie and is structurally sound but needs a lot of cleaning and general maintenance. We decided to buy it since everything we've ever lived in has been a fixer-upper. Here is a picture of a Morgan 41 but not Shambala (Paul forgot a camera when he went to look at her):

Paul is driving to Ohio on Sept. 13th to start working on the boat and get her in the water while Staci and the kids go to visit Paul's sister, Sara, and her husband, Tom, in Seattle for a week. After that we will all meet back in Colorado and drive our minivan w/trailer out to Ohio to start the adventure.

We'll stick around Port Clinton for week or two to make sure the boat is ready to go and then it will be off to the Erie Canal. In Buffalo we will need to take down the mast and store it on deck for the transit of the canal and then put it back up once we reach Albany and the Hudson River. From there we'll be heading south along the New Jersey coast and into the Chesapeake where we'll eventually get to the Intracoastal Waterway which we'll follow all the way to Florida.

We'll update the blog as often as possible but we won't always have internet service.

Holy S#%t,  we still can't believe it's really happening!