Finally Home (or, There and Back Again)

After 309 days off the dock, the good ship September Dream and crew have returned home from an amazing trip to the Bahamas and back.


Oh, and apologies to J. R. R. for the blatent rip-off with the post title. :-)

We were blessed with great weather for our last day of travel on Monday.  Clear skies with just a few clouds, light winds and cool but comfortable temperatures.  We headed into the first lock at Merrickville just a bit after 0900, accompanied by two Sea-Rays and a canoe.

By 1300 we rounded the bend at Kemptville and had our first view of Pirate Cove Marina in more than ten months.  From the distance we couldn't see any people, but we could see that while many boats were in the water quite a few were still up on shore and many still wrapped in shrink wrap.

Within half an hour we had made the turn into the marina channel, and entered the basin.  By 1340 we were securely tied up in our slip, shut down the engine and completed the last day of our amazing journey.

It has been an interesting transition back to land based life.  I haven't driven a car since we left, other than the rental we drove back from Waterford for our daughter's wedding.  Driving home from the marina was a bit of an experience.  After ten months of driving at a speed of 7 knots, 100 kph feels very fast. :-)

To say that our dogs were happy to see us is a major understatement.  I'm sure they thought we had deserted them forever, so they were over the moon when we got home.

It's also been a bit to adjust to living in the house again.  After such a long time living in less than 400 square feet, our house feels absolutely massive.

So, now that we're home the question arises about what comes next for us. Well, this will probably be the end as full time cruisers for us.  We love our boat and the amazing places it has carried us, and while we really enjoyed our life afloat during this trip we've found that full time on the boat just won't be for us.

Over the next few weeks we'll be spending our time getting ourselves back into land living mode, and dealing with a couple issues that have come up since we left.  We also have some maintenance that I need to take care of on the boat.

We'll be making the trip up to the wall above the Ottawa Locks for Canada Day again this year, but other than that we don't have any major travel plans.  Likely we'll switch back into seasonal boating mode again and do weekends and short day trips for the rest of the summer.

Our future retirement plans are a little fuzzy for us at this point.  One realization we had on this trip is that we really like the nomadic lifestyle.  Another is that we really like being someplace warm in the winter. :-)

So, we'll take the next year or two to re-evaluate what we want to do next.  We're considering transitioning into an RV lifestyle for our winter nomadic travels.  A couple that were at our home marina had an interesting lifestyle.  They lived on their boat in the marina during the summer and travelled to the southern US in their RV in the winter.  We may look at only going partially nomadic, and get a smaller home in the country as our summer home.  We have lots to figure out, so we'll take our time doing it.

I'll probably not be doing any more regular posts on the blog from here on out.  I still have a number of "How We Do It" posts to write up, and I also will be doing a trip statistics post.  I've stopped the day counter in the left column as well, and it will stay at 309 days, which was how long we were off the dock.

Finally I want to thank everyone that followed along on our journey through this blog.  While I never approached writing in this blog as if I were addressing any audience larger than myself it has been a lot of fun to receive comments and feedback from people that actually were reading it.