Yes, we are still in Massachusetts, YES the house is NOW on the market and SweetPea is still in South Carolina, so what's happening with us?
To begin I guess to best understand is to state the fact that Jim and I are creatures of great extremes. When we purchased SweetPea we moved aboard and were all in, less than a year before we did not even know such a purchase would take place. We had owned a 17 foot bass boat for 20 years and thought of purchasing something larger but at that time we were thinking 20 foot maybe. The year before we bought a camper which we moved to a lake in RI to spend summers fishing and have a summer getaway. It was a plan, a good plan, but little did I know what was to come next. About a month after we closed up the camper for the winter Jim told me about the boating blogs he had been reading and about this boat trip you could make that was 6000 miles ( the great American loop). Jim is the big dreamer, me, not so much, I rolled my eyes and tried to make it look like I wasn't really interested but wow how cool was that! I started to read the blogs and was really fascinated, it had all my favorite things boats, water, travel and the stories were amazing, the pictures incredible. Could we really do this? Well 6 months later we were looking at our next boat and it was a bit larger than the 20 foot fishing (lake boat). It started out 32-34 feet, actually we were thinking maybe a Mainship, hey it doesn't cost to look? Right? As the dream grew so did the boat, 34' to 40, we travel down to Myrtle beach to look at some boats and ended up at the AGLCA rendezvous. OK, I was sold ! after actually talking to these people who were doing and " living the life", 2 months later we had found and purchased our new to us boat that had grown once again to 44 feet and it was located only 20 mins from our home. We moved aboard and visited our home a few times over the summer and that fall 2010 we dropped our lines and headed south! "Holy crap I think we have more balls than brains" this is what Jim said as we were heading out of the safety of our harbor with not much more than 15 hours of experience with a boat of this size..........
We returned 18 months later back to our home port to sell the house, that was May 30th 2012 after 8800 miles of boat travel. It's all here on the blog if you want to read about it.
Back to present day,
The house went on the market 2weeks ago and I haven't been back aboard Sweetpea since the day Jim left heading to South Carolina in September 2012.
Selling the house is more emotional than I had anticipated, I love this house and we have spent 10 of the 12 years we have owned it, updating, to get just the way we wanted, only to sell it. If I could move it I would, but its not a boat.
Tomorrow we have an OPEN HOUSE, and tonight we pick up our daughter (SweetPea) who has found herself a new love in Austin Texas where she is planning to move. So it's one day at a time for all of us. We do have to get back to South Carolina in the next few days (week) to move the boat to a different marina, that is set in stone, where? We have not decided yet.
