The Long Goodbye

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve not posted in a while. The reason is simple – we’ve been off the boat since June and traveling. In the last two months we’ve left Australia temporarily and have been to the U.K., France, and a now the United States. Evenstar is laid up on a mooring in Oz, awaiting our return.

For us, it’s a time of transitions and changes as our children are growing up.

We’re Going to Need a New Tagline

For years, it’s been “Two Adults, Two Teenagers, One Boat.” When Will  left us to go to college we kept it, since he’d still be spending summers and vacations with us. When he was no longer a teen, we let it slide because he was still a part of the crew.

Now things are changing.

Yes, he apparently has gotten taller while he was off at school. It’s not just the hat.

Though Will will always be part of the crew in our hearts, he’s also starting his own life. After graduating from Southampton Solent with First Honours, he’s taken a job with Betts Boats in Anacortes, Washington – the same place he did an internship last summer. So for the foreseeable future he’ll be in the Pacific Northwest and we don’t know when he’ll be making a passage with us again.

Many of you have experienced this. It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for since they were born – to see them as full-fledged adults starting on their own successful lives. And you’ve viewed it with as much fear as joy, because you know things are changing forever and your child isn’t really under your wing any more.

The Nest Gets Emptier

At the same time that Will is starting his adult life, his sister Danielle is headed off to college.Since she’s been boat schooled, we don’t have any graduation pictures to share with you. But we’re dropping her off at Bucknell in mid-August. So we still get her for some summer vacations, but she’s headed off too.

We’d expected an overlap year with both kids in college at the same time, while putting off this empty nest moment another year. But the UK university system is a bit more focused that the American system, and Will’s Bachelors of Engineering in Yacht Design degree is a three-year program, not four. They don’t waste a lot of time on niceties like a “core curriculum” or “rounding out your liberal arts degree”; he started doing all yacht design all the time on day one and so is through a year faster. While it’s a nice bonus to our wallets, it feels a little like we got robbed of another year with him.

So we find ourselves poised at this moment a year earlier than we expected.

The Goodbye Tour

We’ve got a lot to cover on this trip which is why we’ll be off the boat so long. Graduations, new schools, new cars, moving, drivers licenses, and a whole laundry list of things we want to do and that we must do.

I promise in the future I will include more details posts on this since we have a lot of pictures and stories to share. It’s been a busy time. But for now, here’s the summary of the last couple of months.

• Early June: Leave Australia for Southampton, UK.
• Help Will get moved out of his apartment for about a week while seeing Southampton.
• Mid June: Take a ferry to Caen France. From there we spent a few days touring the Normandy region before heading for the Loire valley
• A week in the Loire Valley and Burgundy, followed by…
• A week in Paris
• On June 30th we took the chunnel train from Paris to London, where we met my parents for six days of London tourism.
• Return to the Southampton area to a rented cottage in Hamble-le-Rice, where we were joined by Will’s uncle and his two cousins.
• July 10th – Southampton Solent Graduation
• July 15th – Everyone heads back to the U.S.
• July 18th – Rent a car and drive from Virginia to Florida to visit Kathy’s father and her younger brother. Also we had a mad scramble to get Will a driver’s license.
• July 27th – return to Charlottesville. Will buys a car.

Over the next few weeks we’re headed up to Rhode Island to see friends and family, then to Bucknell to drop Danielle off at school. After that, we pack up Will’s new car and drive cross-country with him to his new job in Anacortes.

Sometime around the end of September or early October we’ll be headed back to Australia. Just the two of us, headed to a truly empty boat for the first time.

It’s going to take some getting used to. The good news is, Kathy and I learned back in March that we actually still get along quite well when left alone. Another blog post I owe you – our surprise week-long 25th anniversary getaway to New Zealand (while Danielle visited colleges in the US) – explains all that. We had two weeks on our own, and we had a lot of fun together. BTW the “surprise” was as in “unplanned” versus “someone did something nice for us”. The only real surprise there was learning how much Australia would charge to renew our visas unless we left the country and came back…

So with some luck, perseverance, and a spiffy new laptop I’ll bring you up to date on some goings on since my last proper update.

In the meantime…I’ll tease some pictures, everything from Penguins to Paris!