My most sincere apologies for making the first post a long and boring one. Yeah, yeah, it’s supposed to be an exciting adventure, but preparations have been stressful and overwhelming. Not exactly how most people envision retirement. Here’s the long and exhausting list.
Sell the house. That’s a lot of preparation and paperwork, especially if you fill the wrong forms. Luckily our next-door neighbors made an offer before the house went to the market, so no painting and no staging, and we get to rent it back for 5 weeks.
Rent small storage space. Far enough from Silicon Valley to avoid a premium price, but not so far because we actually have to drive there. Several times. Fairfield it is. The space is 5 by 8 feet only because they had it curiously cheaper than a 5 by 5. Just a big closet anyway.
Quit job. Reset life. Deal with health insurance mess (only in America) and a new laptop no longer supported by people who know what they are doing. Get lost with no more corporate email contacts or calendar. Figure out how to backup my data now, since I can no longer rely on multiple hard drives where one of them is always in a different physical location. After a false start with iDrive, I settled for CrashPlan which works nicely with Linux. It’s been 22 days of continuous uploading and my full backup is still not halfway done, but it should complete before we have to leave.
Get rid of everything! Well, almost. That includes half of my windsurfing gear and a lot of photography equipment. There’s thousands of things here at home. For every one we have to decide whether to dump it (possibly scanning it before if it’s a piece of paper), recycle it (how?), donate it (to whom?), sell it (how?), move it to storage (will it fit?) or bring it to the boat (will it fit?). Truly overwhelming. So far: one trip to the used records store. Three car loads to Half Price Books. One trip to San Francisco windsurfing swap meet. Another to the Delta swap meet (this one a 1.5 hour each way just to sell a boom and a mast for a tenth of the price I paid for them). Another trip to San Francisco to donate art supplies. One trip to the local recycling center. Another to the hazardous household waste center to dump old paints and such. Lots of ebay transactions and corresponding trips to the Post Office. One garage sale (an incredible amount of work, before, during and after the sale… got rid of a lot of crap, though).
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Update estate planning documents, wills, power of attorneys. Tell friends who will be in charge. Scan important documents. Pay one last visit to various doctors, dentists, optometrists and therapists. And the accountant too. Shuffle bank accounts: close the useless ones, open better ones. Do some financial planning, get kids to open checking and credit card accounts and teach them some basic financial hygiene.
Finish dinghy. I started building Gecko three years ago, when cruising plans where still unclear and nebulous. And I’m finishing right in time to use it as a tender for the big boat. It turns out the nesting feature will be a plus for moving it to the East Coast. As of last week, it sails! With a windsurfing sail, of course. There’s still some minor pending things, though, such as installing the mainsheet cleat.
Look after the construction of the boat. The more fundamental decisions have already been made, ranging from the very important ones (what anchors and rode to carry) to the critical ones (what toilets to install). There is, however, still a long list of options, each one requiring some research: Rigid or semi-flexible solar panels? How many? Connected in series or parallel? MPPT or PWM controllers? (Hey, what do I know about solar energy?) Lithium or AGM batteries? How many 12v and 120v outlets and where? Pentex or Hydranet sails? Cork floor? Logo and lettering (“nope, we can’t paint it that way”). Choose color of everything: bottom paint (black), boot stripe and lettering (rochelle red), sail cover (charcoal gray), cushions (mix redwood). Do we want Dyneema lifelines? What about AIS? Do we prefer GMR 18 HD or GMR 18 xHD? P-79 or triducer? Don’t worry, first time I hear most of those acronyms too.
Kids and pets. OK, we know where our kids are going to be, but we had to figure out plans for the pets. I’m not going to bore you with more details, except to tell you that the cat (that four-legged creature) is coming to the cat (that two-hulled thing) with us. One of us is happy about that, another one not so much. Oliver has not expressed an opinion, but he’ll probably join the not-so-happy camp.
Et cetera. I’m leaving out a ton of things. I don’t think I need to make this post any longer to convey the idea.
In the middle of all this there’s a little time to attend one last new-age, crazy, hippie event that you can only find in California (Ecstatic Festival, in this case). And plenty of time to question our sanity. Haven’t we shown terrible bad judgement with this decision? Leave a tech job and a steady check, a beautiful house in Silicon Valley, old and new friends, two daughters in colleges less than a hundred miles away, most of our possessions… to cram ourselves in a small floating platform with composting toilets and no internet 3000 miles away?
Luckily, we’re past the point of no return. And we have these memories to remind us why we are doing it.
