Where's home, you ask?

7º 02.623s 134º 17.243w

Sat May 04 2019

Our pal Mike Racine just texted me, asking “how you going to get JollyDogs back home?”. I thought about that for a while, and then I simply texted back, “where’s home?”

I wasn’t trying to be cute. I simply don’t know how to answer the question.

Isabel was born and raised in the UK, and was delighted at the benefits provided by membership in the European Union. She became a naturalized citizen of the US many years ago, but deep down inside she’ll always feel pround to be a subject of the queen. I’m American born and bred, not ashamed of it, but don’t go around thumping my chest either. It’s just a fact.

The Internal Revenue Service remembers we’re American, you can bet your ass on that.

We’re not like disaffected youth that join a gang or an idiotic terrorist organization to seek meaning in their life. We’re just aware that we haven’t met most of the billions of folks on this planet, and we haven’t seen how they live or learned why they think the way they do. We are interested in knowing more, and we love spectacular natural scenery and creatures. We do feel like we’ve found our tribe in the cruising community.

It’s a curious topic of conversation, even between two of us. Where do we eventually want to call home? Do we feel like we must return to the US to live at some point, simply because we’ll be able to access medicare? Well, we did pay for that so called “entitlement”.

Many of our friends plan their lives in great detail. We just have a general notion of where we might be in six months or a year, and a lot of that has to do with not being smited by a cyclone. When will we give up cruising and return to a “normal life”? First off, this feels normal to us, but secondly our only response is “when it’s not fun anymore, or when we can think of something we’d rather do, or when our level of health and vitality doesn’t support such a physically and mentally challenging lifestyle”. This really isn’t for the faint of heart. . .

For now, home is where we hang our hat as they say, or wherever JollyDogs is moored. Good enough for us, so try to wrap your head around that.