Visitors Aboard

Vlad and our friend Dustin, who visited a couple of weekends ago

If you want to get people to come see you, tell your friends and family that you're leaving to cruise the world for a couple of years. We have been blessed with a ton of visitors lately - one group every weekend for the past month and even more to come - and it's amazing to share this experience with the folks we know best, to see their faces when they first step aboard. Sometimes they're enthusiastic and other times they have this amazed look like "how do you live in a 200-foot, plastic house that moves." But whatever the case, they have all been incredibly supportive of and excited about our grand trip. Plus, it gives them all an excellent reason to vacation in tropical islands!

When we first started planning this crazy adventure a year and a half ago, I was reading (and still am) everything I could about sailing and cruising. Perhaps it verged on obsession, but thank goodness I indulged because I found some invaluable information. One such article was by the folks over at Windtraveler, where I've found an immense amount of great information. This article focused on having guests aboard, and I think it covers pretty much all the bases. The only thing I can see that differs from our boat is that you should bring foul weather and snorkel gear because we don't have extra, and we are fine with making gluten-free meals.

Bettie, being a boat, doesn't have a ton of space. We don't have separate cabins or a shower or an electric toilet. Get ready for some pumping. It's not quite like camping because this is a home after all, but it's lacking some of the basic amenities that we take for granted in modern life. I guess we could remodel the boat to have separate cabins, and we could add a hot water heater for a shower. But that would cost extra money, money that would be better spent, in our opinion, on seeing the world. Even though we lack some creature comforts, we have an amazing time, have less stuff cluttering our lives (there's nowhere to put it!), get to spend all day, every day with each other and will have the opportunity to visit places and interact with people in ways that we never thought possible.

So to all our future visitors, thank you for gracing our lives. Don't be apprehensive about the lack of space, and please bring shower shoes, at least while we live in the marina!