Wow. It's funny how no matter where you are and what you're doing, it quickly seems normal. I remember back in 1999 when we started cruising, it didn't take long at all before it seemed natural, as though it had been our lifestyle forever. And now, sitting in our living room in Durango, Colorado, it's hard to remember cruising.

Which is why, of course, we want to go again. All the good times -cockpit parties, snorkeling on the reefs to catch dinner, exploring cities and museums, hiking on unspoiled dunes - have become hazy memories, and it's time to jolt them a little. (At the same time, the little unpleasantnesses have been conveniently forgotten, and the really awful experiences have lost their emotional gloss and become great stories to tell at parties!) We find ourselves telling these stories to our new friends here, bringing pictures of our travels to slide shows, always choosing the steak in restaurants because our standard for "fresh" fish is "we just caught it half an hour ago."

Planning our second cruise has been very different from our first. Then, we made a clean break, selling nearly everything we owned and leaving the community we'd been a part of. We weren't necessarily planning on living aboard forever, but we were making a wholesale switch from one lifestyle to another. This time, we want to keep one foot in each world. Durango is a great place to live, close to both some of Colorado's most impressively beautiful mountains and the redrock desert of Utah. (By the way, if you'd like to see some of our impressively beautiful mountains, check out these stories and pictures from our recent hikes.) And we've joined some local organizations, and made some friends. There's a great feeling you get when you go to a local event and see people you know, or even just recognize, and we had missed that without realizing it. It's nice to have friends around who aren't going to be heading in the opposite direction from you next week!

Our original plan was to rent out our house while we were gone, but that's not going to happen this time; we're in full throes of remodeling, and I can't imagine anyone would pay to live here. Plan B was to hire a contractor and have the entire place finished while we were gone, which would have been lovely except that we have been too busy to complete our building plans to the point where this could be done. So it looks like we're going to go with Plan C, which is to hire someone (we have someone in mind, fortunately, who has already done some of the work on the house) to complete certain portions of the remodeling. This will mean that at least we'll have someone in the house every so often to make sure things don't explode. But we'll also need to hire a service, I guess, to shovel the walk if it snows (so as not to get fined by the city, or sued if someone slips and breaks a bone), and to do yard work in the spring until we return. (It should be cheap, since we have a postage-stamp yard.)

We still have our mail service from our first cruise; we're "on hiatus" but will start it up again when we leave. Almost all our bills are automagically paid from our bank account, which should make things easier. We'll have to cut our phone service to bare-bones and suspend DSL; suspend our newspaper delivery and have our mail redirected to our mail service; store our pickup truck and arrange for the insurance to be lowered. (By state law we have to keep some insurance on it, even if nobody's using it. I'm not too upset about it, though, because we had to pay more than that to keep Windom insured, even while it was out of the water!) I also need to send more money to the IRS and state DOR to prepay most of our taxes, because I'm planning on filing for an extension so I don't have to worry about the dodgy mail situation from the Bahamas, where we plan to be come tax time.

Speaking of money, I'm sure a lot of you are wondering about our job situation. Thanks to some very nice people at NCAR, where I used to work in Boulder, I have a part-time "casual" telecommuting job. I really enjoy it because I feel like I'm contributing to scientific research again. Best of all, it's okay for me to take off huge hunks of time - like this. Britt is doing web application development on a contract basis with a local company, and is coming to the end of his work there. (Hopefully they'll hire him again when we come back!) He also has put in a proposal to do some work for another company while we're on the boat - the idea is that he can do the development offline on his laptop, and then either mail a CD or upload all at once from a net cafe or Batelco office. I know that working while cruising doesn't sound too vacation-like, but Britt is a type-A who felt the lack of intellectual stimulation on our last cruise, and is looking forward to having 10 hours or so a week of work to do. And we can't deny the money will help, because the part-time cruising lifestyle is significantly more expensive than the full-time one.

The current plan is to try to tie up all these loose ends over the next week or two and then head out. We still have the RV, which was probably a mistake as we haven't used it since we got back to Colorado; we'll try to sell it when we reach Florida and get resettled with the boat. We'll do the minimum necessary to get back in the water at the boatyard, and then go to a marina in Fort Myers and finish re-commissioning there. With luck we'll be in the Keys at the turn of the year, and in the Bahamas not long after.

Thanks for joining us, whether you "came along" on our first voyage or are just discovering our site now.