Leaving Gaeta

As we prepare to leave our winter home of Gaeta, Italy, we are filled both with intense excitement and sadness. Of course, we look forward to our second cruising season with a great deal of anticipation – after all, cruising is why we have been living on a boat through the winter. True to form, of course, only 36 hours before we plan to leave, we do not yet know where we will spend most of our last 15 weeks. We know that we are heading south from here to Sicily, but don’t yet know whether from there we will turn right toward Sardinia and then Spain, or left to Greece and possibly Turkey or Croatia. Those of you who know us well are probably not surprised by our last minute decision-making.

But we also feel lots of sadness about leaving our winter port. Though we hoped to have a pleasant winter between the two cruising seasons, we never anticipated that these six months would themselves be so rewarding. In addition to enjoying our several opportunities for wonderful trips, and our proximity to Rome, Naples, and other nearby sites, we’ve come to love our daily life in this little beach town — it has really come to feel like home. We’ve finally nailed down where to get the freshest Mozzarella di Buffalo and the best inexpensive “vino rosso” in town. The man at our favorite pizzeria knows us all and usually feeds the kids before they bring home what they’ve purchased for our dinner. The guys at the local fruit stand humor our minimal language skills, no longer answering our awkward Italian queries in English. Spring is in the air, so merchants are readying for the summer crowd, but the crowd isn’t yet here. And with the better weather, our fellow cruisers are just out and about more, and we have really enjoyed getting to know more of them. Life here is pretty simple and pretty great. We will miss it.

But what we will most miss are our new friends, both cruisers and a few families from the Navy community. Both these groups are used to saying goodbye frequently, but we are not. We have become particularly close with Connie Miller and her family, who really welcomed us into the Navy community like we were one of theirs. And within the wonderful cruising community, we had the most difficult time saying goodbye to the Schoenmachers, our new and wonderful friends from the Netherlands. They left yesterday after a very difficult and prolonged goodbye. We had hoped that spending a week sailing together – nine of us on Nowornot for 8 days – would make us sufficiently tired of each other that it would be easier to go our separate ways. (They went North; we’re heading South.) But our trip to the neighboring islands (Ventotene, Ischia, Procida, and Capri) was fabulous, and made our separation all the more teary. Sarah and Charlotte (their 9 year old daughter) became even more inseparable than they already were – spending hours hunting for the perfect sea shell, carving bamboo twigs into whistles, and turning our boat into a floating disco. Charlotte even spent enough time with us to learn to love peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The boys enjoyed playing beach football (soccer) with their 10 year old Martijn, though their last game together ended with Danny breaking his toe (a splint and two weeks of hobbling should do the trick). And we became very close to the parents. Steve and Maarten really bonded over long hours of boat repairs, most notably the virtual re-build of the back end of our dingy. Deb and Annette spent hours walking and talking, and even managed to sneak in a final and wonderful trip to Rome together after our return from the islands. What made our separation so hard is knowing that future time with them will never be the same. We will undoubtedly visit each other and/or vacation together at some point, but our kids and their chemistry together will certainly change, and the hours of relaxed, unaccounted-for time to just hang out – well, that is surely unique to this time and place and we all knew it.

What is also very different for us now as we plan to leave Gaeta is the salience of the impending conclusion to this wonderful adventure. The endpoint of this fantasy year lingers in every decision we are now making – so very different from how we felt throughout our preparations last spring and summer, when our entire dream year stretched before us. And it differs dramatically from the experience of our cruising neighbors, most of whom have years remaining on their clocks or who have no defined endpoints. Not only does the reality of a fixed ending affect the length, but we’ve come to see how the presence of an endpoint in the future changes how we experience the present. Of course, we don’t expect a lot of sympathy here. But it feels really different now as we approach the final segment of our journey. We see more evidence of our old knee jerk response to make every minute matter, and we try hard to fight this instinct with what we’ve learned this year – that our time and efforts ultimately yield more true gifts when they don’t have to “count.” But still, our normal desires — to do more, see more, cover more ground – are staring us in the face as we chart our itinerary for this final leg of our year-long adventure. Old patterns do die hard.

As we want to get this posted on our last day here, while we still have easy access to a high speed internet connection, we’ll sign off now. As we read over this and our previous updates, we realize that we’ve focused recently a great deal on our travels, and haven’t provided much about our the day to day life here in Gaeta that we came to appreciate so much. We also haven’t written much about our home schooling activities, which has very much helped to shape our life these last 6 months. So look for these, as well as an update on our itinerary decisions, when we next post to the web.

We hope this finds all our interested friends doing well, and wish you all “fair winds and following seas”.