The Plan...

In 1995 we had a conversation that became a shared dream and in 1996 we had a plan. We are both driven by goals. We made a game plan which organized our goals, and set dates to meet our objectives. We immediately set a departure date in early 2005 and worked back from that date to outline what needed to happen to reach this goal. It was not brain surgery and by nature of our employment we were already task oriented so it was easy to put this in play for our personal life.

To make anything happen you have to have a dream. Imagine the possibilities and make them real. We wrote our dream on a piece of paper. Now it was real. Once on paper we put together a time line. We listed everything that had to happen to make this dream come true, and then set realistic time frames to each task. We took one full wall in Laura's home office and wrote on post-it-notes of every task and month it was to be worked on. We could move notes from month to month when we got held up on a project or completed something early and we color coded them by importance. It worked quite well as we could see the post-it-notes decline in number. We knew that it was getting time to depart. For us seeing our plan daily and knowing where we stood was a constant reminder and kept us on track. We stayed focused and believed we could pull this off and we did.

We worked hard and saved money. The last few years before we sailed off, we down-sized our expenses. Instead of eating out several times a week, we only ate out on special occasions. We drove older cars, moved from a 3 bedroom house with 2 car garage to a townhouse. All of our free time went to finding and outfitting the boat. We read everything we could find about sailing, boat repairs, cruising life, read all the magazines and walked every boat show. We dedicated every waking moment to making this dream become reality.

In 2002 our plan was interrupted because Susan got layed-off. What a bummer only 3 years away!. The layoff sort of screwed things up financially. We were hoping to take advantage of living off Susan's pension and having a comfortable capital reserve. We looked at the financials again. We could work 6 more years until Susan was 54 and a year from drawing on her pension, or set a savings goal and leave once we made that goal. We went for the savings goal since it got us underway in 2 years. We were terrified we'd end up always planning but never leaving. Of course we'll both be working as greeters in Walmart when we're 60 but we have no regrets at all.

Susan worked for over 20 years in the IT industry and was quite ready to leave all the stress behind and the very thought of having a web site was never in our minds. Caliber approached us about sponsoring a web site for us and even doing all the design work. Can't lose on this one. So the logs on this web site are primarily the emails to friends and family. You may find them a tad cynical and irreverent, but hopefully humorous as well.

We hope you enjoy the log of our adventure. Keep checking back for updates!