The last time I was this cold it was in this same city, three months ago. I am currently sitting in the Washington, DC airport freezing my toes off. With nothing but flip flops as footwear to go from Tanzania to the Virgin Islands, my 10 lower appendages are quite chilly. I mean there is snow outside and I am in flip flops. I look crazy!

The girls went outside the airport to check out the ice and snow. They came back in freezing!



   It’s hard to believe that our time in Tanzania has come and gone, and that I am now people watching in a US airport sort of in a haze of confusion. Everything is feeling strange at the moment, it will take us a few days to get used to first world living again, the costs, the style, the people, the everything. And we are throwing ourselves head first into it by making our next stop Miami. When we were booking our flights home from TZ we realized it would only cost us $10 more per person to make a short stop in Miami, and so of course we were in.

 

Starting our trip home from Tanzania with Ethiopian Airlines

This will be a great opportunity for us to catch up with our friends there, to do some US shopping to restock our clothes (we do this about once a year), and get our macbook fixed as we have been working with a defective laptop screen for far too long.

From Miami we will head back to our boat in St Thomas, USVI. We have a lot of question marks as to what we will be doing after that. We know that towards the end of May we will be heading back to Canada for a few months, as Eben’s sister Jaala and his first sailing buddy Jordan are getting married, and then we have two more sets of close friends of ours getting married in the months following. We figured it is time we go back and visit with our family and friends; its been over a year since our last visit. So that leaves us with only 2 and a half months on the boat.

Being that flights to Canada are not cheap, and we have to figure out what the heck we are doing with the boat while we are away, all we are seeing are $$$ which need to be made somewhere. So either Eben is going to set himself to work in the VIs, doing more sewing and boat projects for people there, or we will sail around those islands for the season and try and figure out the money thing once we get back to Canada. Either way, money has to be figured out. Right now we are just going with the flow, as we usually do. And we will see how we feel once we get back to our floating home.

Because we are talking about several months in Canada, which also line up with the beginning of hurricane season, we are throwing around options of what to do with the boat when that time comes. Leave it in the VIs? Sail it to the DR? One could be pricey and the other would mean crossing the Mona Passage, again. (As a family we have crossed it 3 times. I don’t really have a huge desire to do it again. So maybe Eben will sail Necesse over to the DR with the help of someone else. Maybe you?!)

 

Celebrating seeing Puerto Rico during one of the Mona Passage crossings.

As you can see we don’t have many concrete plans just yet, but we know the general direction we are going in.

Just as a teaser, a few other ideas we have been contemplating are: building a small home in the mountains in Canada, building a thatched-roofed home in the tropics (current idea being the DR), working more in Tanzania, sailing to the Bahamas and spending a season there with friends, checking out Mexico and Panama as possible “home” spots…we’re all over the map! hahahaha It keeps life exciting and the imagination active.