Could Not Have Done It Without You

So last month we spent 3 weeks in Phoenix, Arizona and El Paso, Texas, for a long-overdue visit with the family and to do assorted bits of business plus procure lots and lots (and lots) of boat parts, supplies, and various other items we’d coveted for a while.

If you believe you can sell all your possessions and sail to faraway lands and do it alone, you’d be mistaken. It takes a village to sail away by yourself. Take us, for example.  Before setting sail 19 months ago we saved a few treasures we’d collected over many years of land living, and stored the crap items in a plywood 5’x7’x8’ pod in the Seattle area. We recently decided to move the pod to a storage facility In Phoenix, closer to where I have family.* As far as the Pod People were concerned, all we needed was the money to make the move; but the pod's relocation was complicated because we needed to put a few more treasures in it that close friends of ours had been storing in their home. Had our friends J&N not been there to spend a morning placing those last treasures in the pod, we’d have had to fly from Mazatlan to Seattle, stay in a hotel, rent a car, and do it ourselves before getting the pod shipped to Phoenix. That’s a big favor and that’s what friends are for – and we sure are grateful to have been on the receiving end.

My dear brother and sister in law opened their home for us to use for three whole weeks (and house guests and fish go bad after, what, 3 days or so) – and also drove us around to a bunch of places until we got our bearings; AND THEN gave us free use of one of their vehicles; AND accepted delivery of more packages full of stuff we’d ordered than they ever thought possible. Stuff like, a 50lb. Sailomat wind vane; our 25lb. refurbished autopilot; and a 20lb. box full the o' components of our new ICOM single sideband radio. And those were only the 3 largest objects.  The UPS delivery guy eventually asked my brother if he was building a sailboat in his back yard.  Halfway through our visit my brother looked like this:

My brother drove us to Texas to visit my sister and Ma for 5 days, and actually insisted on driving the whole way, round trip. Hey; I could have helped with the driving – the freeway from Phoenix to El Paso is basically a straight line after you curve left at Tucson, so what’s the worst that could have happened? And I lived in Seattle long enough to handle driving in rain like what we encountered at Deming and on El Paso's Transmountain Road. I’m just sayin’.

Anyway, once in El Paso GB and I showed my family the same frenzied errand-running pattern we’d demonstrated in Phoenix – and my terrific sister let us stay with her and drove us everywhere we needed to go. Sure, we all had lots of laughs and in the end my family said goodbye to us smiling broadly and shaking their heads at us**; but this was our first (and hopefully, biggest) international boat-parts procurement run — and we could not have accomplished it with anywhere near the ease and comfort that we did, supported by our family and friends. GB and I salute you all – and will keep those Latin American souvenirs coming. You’ve earned them.

* The ulterior motive being that GB and I can sponge off the relatives (if they ever again allow us near them), and visit the pod too, in a 2-birds-1-stone kind of dealio. We’re pragmatic that way.

** that happens a lot, actually…