Foreword

Tomorrow everything changes. At 9 am, my father rolls up in his Dodge diesel to haul our new home and all its contents on the first leg of an 828-mile road trip toward warmer waters, leaving everyone and everything we know in our wake.

We’ve spent the past year deconstructing and unraveling two carefully curated lives. It has been a whirlwind of hurried preparation. We bought the boat. I quit my job. We sold our house. We must go. Not in five years. Not next year. Now.

We tackled house projects, car projects, yard projects. We spent hundreds of hours outfitting the boat. We sold many “treasured” items that as it turns out were surprisingly easy to let go of. Our prior lives were busy, but we made time on the weekends for rest. I would ride my bike 7 miles nearly every day. We would cook healthy meals together. We would find time to relax. To take little weekend getaways. All of that has been mostly cast away the past year for a singular focus.

As the house slowly became more and more empty, it began to feel less like our home, and more like someone else’s. In the final weeks almost nothing was left but the memories we had built there. It was our first house. We couldn’t really afford it at first, even though it was a 100-year-old handyman special. With lots of help from her parents, we had made it into a stunning home. We were married in that backyard. To say goodbye was a necessary sadness. With all the furniture gone, I slept alone on boat cushions on the floor for the final two nights, surrounded by the ghosts of our former life.

We’ve finally announced to our friends and acquaintances our plans, holding our cards close to the chest until there was absolutely no turning back. That moment seemed to be when the house sale was imminent, the final line untethered from our comfortable lives.

Last year we had all the things a successful American couple is expected to have, earned over a decade plus of hard work — a beautiful home, paid-off cars, an established career, a close social network. Today we have a storage unit and a 25’ boat.

And now that the last days are finally here, there is time to pause and assess what it is we have done. What we actually have to do next.

We’re not ready. There are still boat projects we want to finish. Maybe in the water in Tennessee, but the nighttime low temps are dropping quickly. Maybe at the second marina, or the third. We also have a lot of paid work to get through next week. Not sure when we’ll find a moment to sit at our laptops once we are there but we’ll have to make time. The rushing continues.

I’ve never operated a boat in a river, short of motoring for 10 minutes to Lake Michigan for our inaugural sail right after purchase. I’ve never passed commercial traffic. I’ve never used our VHF, our chartplotter, the depthfinder. Because our boat wasn’t properly rigged for it, I’ve never reefed our main sail.

This summer we did get a good amount of training with docking, motoring, anchoring, dodging drunk knuckleheads, and sailing in various conditions at our small Nebraska lake. I have sailed in saltwater, albeit very briefly and not in our boat. I am not naive enough to think I am ready. The majority of my preparation for the Loop is a year’s worth of reading, listening to podcasts, and watching videos. I hope it’s enough to get us to Mobile. Maybe by then I will be ready.

-E