This is our journey aboard the sailboat Checked Out.  As Jan was a librarian/media specialist we thought the name was cute.  The name of the blog plays on that theme as we have just retired and will live on the boat, hence We Are Checked Out, also very cute.  We have a Fatty Knees 7′ sailing dinghy called Checked In, still very cute.

Jan’s last day was last Friday June 11 and my last day was Friday May 22, 2015.    This journey started in the spring of 2014 when Joy and Ivan Edwards decided to sail off in their sailboat from their slip in the Chesapeake down to Florida and over to the Bahamas.   They spent a year in the islands and are now headed north to Maine.

When we found out what Joy and Ivan were doing Jan said “I’ll have 30 years in teaching next summer,  we should do that too!”   We spent most of last year asking the what if kind of questions and doing research about our options.  We set a go/no go decision date of January 1st, 2015.   We decided to go on this adventure because if we don’t go now we never would.

Our plan is to live on the boat and travel for 2 years.   At that time we’ll make another go/no go decision to stay on the boat or move ashore.   In order to make this work we have sold our house and all of our furniture and most of our belongings.    We are presently in temporary housing close to the boat and it only took a few trips with my pick up to move all of our possessions.  I could have gotten everything in 1 load of the truck but it would have looked like the Beverly Hillbillies moving to California only the dog would have been in the back of the truck instead of Granny.    I mention this to make the point of how much stuff we have gotten rid of to make this journey work.   We still have too much stuff to fit on the boat but that is another post.  We also have a lot of work to do on the boat to get it ready for our adventure.

We each have a saying that fits this experience.  Jan has a bracelet that says “All who wander are not lost”

I quote Bilbo Baggins at the beginning of the Hobbit movie where he yells to a friend, I’m going on an adventure!”

More to come,

Jan & Matt and Scout.

Checked Out