overJOYed

This dinghy, along with the boat behind it, will soon be FOR SALE.

We are overJOYed.  The title for the post is Ean's pun, of course.  Anyone who knows him would guess it.  As in: Dear JOY, we are OVER you.

When we started this crazy adventure, we set a goal - to get 'round the world - but we gave ourselves a two-year "out" clause - if, after two years, either of us wanted OUT of this life, then we would get OUT and get a NEW life.

The first time we WANTED out - really discussed it seriously - was in Key West last June.  I just went back to reread the blog post.  I wrote, "I'm sure I'll look back at this juncture and either laugh or cry hysterically."

Well, I'm looking back now, and I realize, it's not an either/or thing.  I can do both.

After we'd been cruising for about a year, I wrote a post called "The Backside of a Dream."  I admitted:

We're coming up on our one-year cruising anniversary, and Ean and I have been reflecting on our new life. We're still pretty clueless.  We've found this life to be more difficult than we expected.  Things break all the time and we don't know how to fix them.  Ean misses toast.  I miss floor space.  We hate being mono-lingual and sand.

We realized, even then, that this lifestyle is not a good fit for us.  But hey, we had agreed to two years.  Let's see what happens.  We had this GOAL, you see.  Of circumnavigating the world.  We thought we could do it.  We wanted to have done it.

To cruise or not to cruise....we've been back and forth a dozen times.  It's hard to explain, but as I wrote a few months ago, cruising has made us bipolar.  A couple of months ago, I was SO excited about making that big leap out into the Pacific.  A couple of weeks ago, I was getting excited about gunkholing around Panama and making our way down the coast to Ecuador.  Hey, maybe we'll do Galapagos after all!  Hey, Easter Island, how cool would that be!

A couple of days ago, after many long conversations, some bitterness and tears, some wistful sighing and wicked blame-slinging, we finally admitted to ourselves that the highs aren't high enough to justify the lows.  Or the lows are too low... or too numerous...?  Maybe, if we would have made it across the S. Pacific, we would have decided to stick out.  SO close.  But Things Fall Apart.

If you're a little sad for us... yeah.  But don't be TOO sad.  Me and Ean, we are lucky, and we don't lose track of that.  We need to figure out what the new life will be - and we have lots of good choices... more than we deserve, probably.

I'll end here for now... although of course there's more to say. Stay tuned. Our next post: JOY FOR SALE (cheap).