We have exactly one month to go before we untie the docklines and head north from Olympia. Sleep has gotten more difficult, the lists of things to do and buy and fix are checked multiple times daily. We grow more and more nervous about how our lives will look 30 short days from now. We are still excited but these last few weeks are beyond stressful. Wine helps.
It feels like I have a million things to do, buy, organize. I press “Two-Day 1 Click” multiple times each day on Amazon.com as I stock up on coffee filters, homeschool books, rechargeable batteries. It will be infinitely more difficult to get, well, stuff, when our car is sold three weeks from now. Mail order will pretty much cease at the end of this month as we won’t be staying in any one place more than a few days in our quest to travel around Vancouver Island by the end of August. Check, check, add another item, check….
In reality though we are ready to go. Only three things keep us at the dock other than Leah’s last day of preschool in mid-June:
- Moving our things from our larger storage unit to the cheaper, smaller out-of-town unit
- Hauling Wondertime in mid-June to paint her terribly overgrown bottom.
Make that two things. I feel better already.
Our departure date is hurtling towards us. At this point we’ll get what we can get done but whatever doesn’t will happen underway. We know this, we’ve done this crazy race to the end twice before. We know we’ll leave no matter what and it’s never mattered before what was still on the list when we threw the lines on board. Some nights through, we collapse, exhausted, at trying to chink away at our lists and take care of our two busy girls (the youngest of which is going through her 2 ½ year disequilibrium with full force. Which can be pretty cute. But still…).
That is when we grab a guidebook off the shelf and start reading, again, about the places we’ll be traveling to. In 30 days. We talk about route plans, anchorages we don’t want to miss, friends to stop and see along the way. We forget about the lists for an hour or two and remember why we are doing all this in the first place.
to read on their way across the much bigger lake. They gifted us with a nice tri-color/anchor light that they had as a spare, inscribed. I think Michael had always lamented that Pelican did not have a tri-color at the top of her mast, which would be much more visible at night than our deck-level navigation lights when sailing. We were touched that our friends wanted us to be visible too.
