Adventures Ahead

Day before yesterday was my last day on the job at County of Napa - wooohoooo! I'll miss a lot of the people there....hopefully, they'll check in on me via my blog and/or email now and then (Hi, friends!) and we'll be able to stay in touch. We had great fun at the Bounty Hunter wine bar/restaurant in Napa on Thursday for an impromptu farewell lunch. I wish I'd had a camera so I could post a photo of the group. Instead, you'll have to be content with this picture of my administrative assistant, Scout, in her usual reclining position while using my laptop keyboard as a warm pillow.

So Mike and I are now "employer-free," and preparing, full-time, for our long cruise next month. We will be sailing our 34-foot Ganley Steel (which means our hull is steel and not fiberglass which was a DARN good thing when I ran into that buoy in the San Pablo bay last spring!) from Alameda, out the Golden Gate, and southward along the coast to San Diego.

In San Diego we'll meet up with about 170 other sailboats for a cruiser's rally called the "Baja Ha Ha." The festivities begin with a Halloween costume party, and then the entire regatta of boats heads south into Mexico, port-hopping and partying, and ending up in Cabo San Lucas about two weeks later. At that point everyone scatters; some head back north and home, others continue further south, and some winter in the Sea of Cortez. Our plans are to sail about 200 miles north into the Sea of Cortez to La Paz, if we have enough time. We'd like to be home by mid-December and will need about three weeks to "bash back," as it is called, because it's straight into the wind all the way back north to the Golden Gate. I think the "bash" part refers to the bruising sailors get from getting bounced all over a wildly heeling boat!

Mike is doing the heavy maintenance on the boat, and my job is to find a housesitter to care for our home and three cats. I've got several great possibilities but it is proving to be quite time-consuming to go through the telephone interviews, checking references, and meeting in person. There's a great website called www.housecarers.com which has been a big help. I highly recommend it if you ever need a housesitter. Hopefully, we'll have someone under contract by mid-next-week.

Amazing to think that this huge change in our lives, that we have waited so long for, has finally arrived! There's quite the celebratory atmosphere in our home these days. Every day, to do exactly (and only) what we want....it's an amazing feeling.