A Brief Recap

Home sweet home.

I am sure I will reflect on this stage of my life as a transitional phase. I’ll walk it back about two years to explain what we’ve been up to. We were living in a beautiful tourist town in Montana. It was the stuff COVID dreams were made of. Despite that, we had been there for about four years and still felt that we just didn’t quite fit. There is a lot more to it than that, but we’ll hash that out later. It was summer and we were on our way home from our fifth or sixth trip out to the pacific northwest for a bike competition. We started talking about where and how we wanted to spend our time. We were already homeschooling so had flexibility there, and were really feeling burnt out by our lives; ready for a change. It took about another twenty miles before we had hatched a plan. 

We would spend the off season, meaning anything outside of bike season, sailing and the rest of the year traveling to bike. ‘Sailing?!?’, did I miss something?”. No, you didn’t. My aunt and uncle have a very remote, off-grid (read: composting toilet) cabin in the northern Bahamas. My sister and her boyfriend had just come back from a trip there, having purchased a small sailboat to cruise. They were pretty stoked on it, so we decided we would tag along. This is the point that everyone asks, ‘Do you know how to sail?’. The answer is ‘No.’. We’ve always been ‘leapers’. 

I promise to circle back to all of this ridiculousness, but in the interest of a recap, let’s go through the rest of the plan. We had a perfect property in Whitefish. An updated cabin on three acres, just a mile outside of town and surrounded by ranches and trust land. We bought it just before COVID, which becomes important later. Initially we were reluctant to part with it and were going to slay in the AirBNB market. After considering the well that runs dry in the summer and the snow removal in the winter, we ultimately decided to sell and make a clean break. While we were getting the house ready to put on the market, we (by ‘we’, I mean Aaron) also had to finish building out a travel trailer that we had purchased from our local bike shop. I’ll tell the whole story of the Stoke Wagn later because it’s pretty funny and turned out very cool. Anyway, the house went quickly and smoothly. We rolled out of Whitefish in October, ten weeks after that initial conversation in the car.

All loaded up, the plan was to make our way to Florida, where we were under contract on a boat. It was a catamaran that would have fit all seven of us (of course we brought the dogs!), but needed some love. Always quick to see ‘potential’, this was also the only option in our price range that late in the cruising (sailing) season. The short version of the following two months is that the appropriately-sized cat fell through and we ended up settling on an inappropriately-sized monohull, already located over in the islands. It was certainly a risk but we were growing more restless by the day, just sitting in a holding pattern in Florida. The boat ended up being worse than we could have imagined. After about three months of trying and failing to fix systems so we could set out on our grand sailing adventure (the sails themselves were missing parts!), we threw in the towel. We sold the boat to a local at a huge loss, but did so gladly. We caught the first flights we could back to Florida, grabbed the Stoke Wagn out of storage, and started driving West. We had treated ourselves to tickets to the Sedona Bike Festival to celebrate the sale of the boat. We are not high maintenance people, but we had been so uncomfortable and out of our element for so long, we were ready to indulge in a little fun, our way. 

This was the beginning of Spring and with sailing during the winters no longer even a consideration, we meandered from Sedona up north. Our only deadline was a race in Washington in early April, so we had time to see the country and ponder our next move. We considered investing in a fixer-upper down where real estate was cheaper and we could bike all winter. We looked at Texas, Arizona, and Utah. We looked for a way that we could stretch the money we had left from the Whitefish house and go way down south and beach camp through the winters. In the immediate future we knew we could make it through the bike season, living small in the Wagn, and figured the rest would reveal itself. We found ourselves in Bellingham, WA by mid-April, where we were welcomed by the warm embrace of old friends. We were content to explore the PNW and just be in the moment, knowing it wouldn’t last forever.