The Dreams That Didn't Come True

While my handsome husband is out to sea I have been tasked with a monumental job.  At the end of our whirl-wind six week tour, the Mr. and I drove a U-Haul from my storage space in Flagstaff to deposit all of my worldly possessions (and me) safely at my parents house in Northern California to await his return and our eventual move to a place of our own.  As I had very little time to go through them before I got on the boat, the relics of my past life loomed (overwhelmingly) large but mostly forgotten in that storage unit.  After seeing the panic on my new husband's face as I raised the stuffed storage unit's door at the thought of moving the huge pile more than once, I knew I had to pare down my belongings - and why shouldn't I?  I'm starting a new life and what better excuse to start out with just the necessities?

SO, I have been steadily going through the many boxes that represented my old life - I would say from college on but I should probably admit that because I'm an over-sentimental pack-rat, it goes way beyond that.  Going through all of that in addition to starting up my blog again and reading through my old entries has gotten me thinking about all of the dreams that didn't come true.

I found some old journals from when I was in high school that laid out in gruesome detail the heartbreak I was experiencing after my first boyfriend broke up with me.  I read these old blog entries and thought about how much I wanted a job as an airline stewardess or a 'real' job in Phoenix.  I thought back to when I first got on the boat that eventually led me to my husband and how homesick I was and how I was crossing all of my fingers that I'd get a six-week break during the time that the boat would be in dry-dock in San Francisco.  The day after we got to San Francisco my husband walked onto the boat and during the following 6 weeks we fell in love.

It simply amazes me when I think about all of those dreams that didn't come true and how happy I am now that they didn't.



Travel Thursday

After returning to my blog for the first time in the better part of a year I realized that there are a few things I wanted to change and a few that I wanted to stay the same. 

Travel has always been important to me and, because I didn't blog while I was actually traveling to all of the awesome places I have gotten to go over the past year-ish, I will continue Travel Thursdays (at least until I run out of those places).

Stop One: South East Alaska:

When I first got the job I was told that I would spend the summer in Alaska and then travel with the boat down to Costa Rica and Panama.  My first thought was that Alaska didn't sound all that interesting or exotic but that spending some time there would be worth getting to travel down to Central America.  When I got to Southeast Alaska that thought was blown way out of the water.  There is no other place in the world like Southeast Alaska.  The wildlife, the natural beauty and simply the grand scale of it all are like nowhere else and, ironically enough, I've missed it more and felt greater ownership of it than anywhere else I've ever been.  This is the first and last post I wrote after I got on the boat and it pretty much describes how I felt about Alaska for the whole of the two months I was there from day one until the season was over.

  Here are a few of the photos I took there that might convince any of you that might be Alaska skeptics (like I used to be).

Happy Trails!

Where I've Been...

Hello out there in the Blogosphere!  It's been almost 8 1/2 months since I left for the adventure of a lifetime.  I was expecting to keep up with my blog while I was away but iffy internet connections (out at sea, who would have guessed) and the lure of living a life a lot less connected kept me away - and to tell you the truth I'm glad it did.  But now I'm starting a new life and new adventures and, just like before, want to use this space as a place to document this transition.  For those of you who read my blog before (hi, Mom) I'm actually in quite a similar position - big transition, looking for a job and looking for somewhere to settle down with one big exception....

I left in July to live and work at sea and in September I met the love of my life,

Got engaged one month later,

And got married in Costa Rica two weeks after that (for anyone that's counting, yes, that's 6 weeks total from meeting to marriage).  Two weeks after we were married we were separated for 3 months (he's sea-faring as well) and when we finally got back together we traveled a solid 6 weeks...

To our honeymoon in Baja, Mexico,

To meet his family in Chicago,

To Seattle to introduce him to the other most important person in my life- my sister,

To California to introduce him to the rest of my family,

And finally to Arizona (my home state!) to end with a belated wedding reception

So now my love is out to sea again, my plans and priorities have changed, and we're starting a life together.  It's going to be crazy and probably hard sometimes (he goes out to sea for 6 weeks at a time every 6 weeks) and as of right now we have no idea where we will live, but to borrow words from William Shakespear and H.I McDunnough, these are the happy days, the salad days, as they say...

Lots, Lots more to come!