Pondering Our Movements

This back and forth (NW to Mexico to NW to Mexico, etc.) has been a good way to see parts of the two countries but could be improved upon in the coming year. We have had guests so often that we sometimes are waiting or hurrying to meet some schedule that They have rather than exploring more from our temporary base in a marina or even at anchor. Here I am thinking of when we are in Barra de Navidad specifically. It is a reasonable bus ride from there to, say, Guadalajara and yet we end up with something to DO every day and never quite get on the road. Admittedly this is not a bad thing but we have watched other boats for people that have taken a few days off and bussed to other places from there.

You may now be asking yourself, “Why is he pondering this right now?”

Here is the nutshell version. As we sit in Vancouver, Washington getting things lined up for our return to the boat (in Mexico) we are thinking about the trip south again. What we don’t want to do is to rocket down I-5 missing the great places along the way that we have missed previously because we were on some sort of imagined schedule. Even though we work at NOT having a schedule it still sneaks in from time to time so that we feel pressured to be somewhere by a certain time. We often fall into this trap without fully realizing it until we do not make our perceived goal. That is when we relax again and take things as they come for awhile. Taking a turn off the freeway and wandering for a few days through Napa Valley or stopping for few days at Crater Lake would be on the list this year. Will we make it to both? I do not know at this point. Coming north we HAD to stop in Las Vegas but from here on out we do not have ANY “have to’s” other than adding or subtracting something from our list of places we would like to visit. Our day to day version of our travels is slow anyway. That is, we might put 300 miles on for one day of driving (think 8 to 10 hours) and call it good. On the boat a 100 mile day (24 hours) is fine. Not pushing is part of not planning so having something or some place on the list is not the same as committing to go there. It is more like a, “wouldn’t it be nice to…” and then see if we actually make it there. Typically too we like to stay put in a place that seems like a good place to hang out. If it is not too expensive it is likely we will stop for days to take in the sights.

So, having positioned you for our methods of not planning you can see how hard it really is to commit to having guests or to saying we will be a particular place at a particular time. On the road it is a bit easier only because we do not have to factor in the weather quite so much. On the boat weather is a much contemplated issue. The longer we think about adding a place to the list of where we are going to go the more complicated it seems to get. It might put us on a schedule by virtue of being difficult to get there or because it is inconveniently off the current trajectory. We get that. We know that adding, say, San Diego so we can visit friends AND find boat parts means we do not know how long we need to be there… this, in turn, cascades into the thought that we wanted to get back to the boat by mid/late October, but we need to see if we can work in the side trip to the Redwoods or stopping in Tucson long enough to see friends and family. You may be beginning to see the dynamics at play here.

We have taken to saying to potential guests coming to Mexico that, “You can pick the place OR you can pick the time but you can’t pick both.” It may take a bus ride (or in the case last year, it may take a ferry ride) to catch up to us. On land it is more like, “If we get as far as X by this time we can swing by for a visit.”

This summer I had believed that I could find a small part time temporary job when we got to Vancouver but that turned out to be WAY too much planning. It probably did not help that the unemployment here is something like 10% but the longer we have been here the more it became clear that between Sandy’s planning for side trips to Mount St. Helens and Canada, and of course we HAD to take in the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, not to mention the Sea of Cortez Cruisers Rally in Cathlamet, the less likely it was that I had time to work. It would have been great to add to the cruising kitty a bit but clearly I can’t plan well enough to add that much time away from my real life. It seems far more likely that I would win the lottery than that I would land a job and have time to go to it!