Off to inspect Paradise

Everyone who retires to a sailboat does so (whether they admit to it or not) to experience their little piece of the Paradise that glossy magazine ads and brochures advertise to snag your cruising dollars. So we leave today, after an agonizing 8 hours at work, to take our ASA Bareboat and ASA Cruising Catamaran courses in Pensacola Beach, FL at Emerald Coast Yachts. Hmmmmmm even the name is designed to make you drift off wistfully into Paradise Dreamland...

We'll be taking the truck instead of the bikes due to the rain, and someone at work asked me yesterday whether I was disappointed about the rain forecast for a good bit of our trip. I'm not at all disappointed because the purpose of this trip is not to lay around endlessly in Florida sunshine (although I can't at the moment think of anything wrong with that), but to have fun learning about the boats we've chosen to spend our remaining years on in the type of wind and weather that we're likely to encounter, and to decide whether we really still want to do this, and to decide whether we can stand to be in such close quarters for so many years. As Tim said in a recent post, I suspect the problem will not be deciding that we don't want to do it, but that we don't want to wait to do it. And what happens if it's 12 straight days of rain and gusty wind and bugs and...? It will still be paradise, because I've long ago learned that paradise is not where you are but who you're with, and 12 days with my best friend in the whole world sounds pretty much like paradise to me.




Courtesy of Emeral Coast Yachts