Living Aboard

If you've ever consider chucking it all and sailing away or if you just want an instant vacation, check out http://www.livingaboard.com/. I've had the best time exploring their website and reading about this lifestyle. Living aboard just about encompasses every item on my "bucket list" and I really hope to be able to do this in my lifetime. I just want to pull up anchor and cruise the Caribbean, coming and going where the wind takes me.

Here's a little exerpt from one of the articles. I am so envious.

DROPPING OUT

by Christie Gorsline

In the prime of our lives and careers my husband and I voluntarily made a radical change. We bought a 37’ sailboat and equipped her to sail around the world. Instead of continuing to work at jobs that had grown tedious and unfulfilling, we stepped off the corporate treadmill.

With both our girls in college, we wanted to abandon suburbia and live differently. We chose a lifestyle based on travel and adventure. We knew that we could, and quite probably should, continue to work full time until a more traditional retirement age. Since childhood we had been programmed by American tradition and habit to work long hours in order to earn as much as possible so that we could buy increasingly larger homes and newer cars. Instead, we determined that our contract with America had been fulfilled.

We quite easily reached the decision to leave the workday routine, but the choice to do it by sail wasn’t automatic. En route to the decision to travel by sail we discarded countless versions of traveling full time. I just couldn’t picture packing a duffle bag and wandering the world by train. I couldn’t envision getting off an airplane in a foreign country and looking for an apartment. But the idea of going by sailboat meant I’d be taking a version of a home with me. That made sense.

Friends and co-workers were a mixture of horrified and envious. We planned to “live everyone’s dream” and yet, they were appalled that we would simply “quit.” Of course, a decision that major is simple only in retrospect. Our progression from suburban commuter to dock lines and left the United States, headed south and west, toward Mexico.