What if we ditched the water-sports-center-idea altogether and went sailing? With our baby, who we realized would be five years old by the time our youngest high-schooler graduated and headed off to college (fingers crossed). We had seen a family with their toddler and infant when we were on a flotilla in the BVI. And it seemed that there were more and more families out there sailing with kids. Every day, as his legs rotated on the elliptical machine in our garage, Adam treated himself to sailing videos on YouTube. Then over dinner or side by side on our big, brown, velvety couch, I’d hear the highlights.
All this talk didn’t translate into a plan, other than: we’d need to rent our house out to fund our sailing life. But what else? We had toyed with building an ADU in our backyard, and it suddenly felt pivotal (to me) to the success of a cruising lifestyle. If we’ve rented our regular house, what if we need to come home? We need to put our stuff somewhere and we need to have somewhere to stay. Because we will come home. We have kids that we’ll want to see or who will be home for the summer. We couldn’t devise a plan that felt like we were abandoning our kids. We looked into a modular prefab company that we’d seen in Costco. With sweaty hands hovering over the keyboard, we signed the contract and submitted it. Two months later, covid lockdown. Everything halted. No city offices were open, no permits were being issued, no construction projects moved forward: nothing. For nearly two years our ADU project had stalled. But not the dreaming.