Merry Christmas

For those of you heading out cruising soon or even those of you in the beginning stages of planning, it's true what they say about ditching the land-locked life: the hardest thing is leaving grandkids behind. It is, in fact, the number one reason for cruisers to leave the cruising life, and I understand completely.

In our situation the decision was made somewhat easier by the loss of Tim's job, meaning that we would needed to have left anyway for "gainful" employment had our cruising life not been in the final planning stages. No question the wonders of modern technology make it better with blogs, YouTube, and Skype, but there is just no substitute for face-to-face loving on the holidays with all the trimmings, regardless of what Scrooge Himself said in the previous post. Fortunately, the cruising community seems full of people all feeling the same thing, and does what it does best, being a community.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to help some young folks out, a young couple with two toddlers who needed some time to do some freelance work and some shopping, so I took the girls and we made cookies and decorated them for a good part of the day so that Mom and Dad could have some grown-up time and Grampy T could get his cookies yet this year even though his own cookie decorators were miles away. While there are no substitutes for my own grandkids, for awhile I was able to provide some kids with a substitute gramma, which seemed to make them, and certainly their parents, happy. And I guess that's one of the things that draws me to this group of societal misfits we call cruisers, this amazing ability to deeply befriend a stranger in a very short period of time. Hopefully some day soon my grandkids can come spend some time on the boat with us and experience this quality group of people so worthy of knowing.

Merry Christmas to all of you from Kintala.