10/3/02 | Back in Colorado

It seems like we've come full circle now. In March of 1999, we began this adventure by putting everything we had left after five yard sales into our VW camper van, and driving to Britt's parents' ranch in southwest Colorado to spend a few weeks. Now here we are at the ranch again, our RV out front packed with everything we didn't leave with the boat. Again, we're poised between an old life and a new. We're occasionally blue with nostalgia for our previous lifestyle, and alternately excited and nervous about what's to come. You'd think that by now we'd be old hands at this.

This time, though, we're not quite as focussed and as far along as we were when we tossed over our professional lives to become sailing bums. We had already bought our "house" -- Windom -- and it was ready for us to move in, even if it was shrink-wrapped and out of the water. Our current "house", the Arf-Vee, will be untenable in the Colorado winter (and I prefer to not live with my in-laws, wonderful as they are, for any length of time) so we're scrambling for alternatives. When we left our jobs, our bank accounts were fat and the market was climbing. Now things are somewhat different. Although we are far from destitute, the pressure is on to make some income to balance all that outgo.

And here we are, back in Colorado. We have always liked our home port state, and I guess we always sort of intended to come back here. But rather than Boulder, where we lived before going cruising, we're going to live in Durango. We're near Britt's family, as well as close to lots of the recreational opportunities we love, but far from the crowds of the state's more populated regions. Surrounded by ranches, resorts, ghost towns, and a whole heck of a lot of National Forest, Durango is the "big city" of the region; but to us, accustomed to the sprawl of the Front Range, it's a comfortably-sized small town. The only problem is that the sprawl of the Front Range is where all the jobs are.

But after spending time with our friends who have been cruising and are "settled down", we realize that something we all have in common is a dissatisfaction with the American model of working at something to make a lot of money, a couple of weeks vacation, back to work for another year, lather, rinse, repeat, wait for retirement. We want to be in a place where we don't have to commute, where we have easy, quick access to hiking and biking, where we can become part of a community of people who share our values. We want to work at things we like doing, that we can potentially do from the boat while we take a four-month cruise, things that are energizing and interesting and useful. We've both always envied people who love their work. After all, if you're going to spend most of each day doing something, it should be something you enjoy.

So we've arranged to rent a nice apartment in "downtown" Durango, on a 6-month lease. Britt, who had his own computer-related consulting business in the past, is going to start another small business focusing on web application development. I'm going to work hard at selling what I write, and I'll keep an eye out for the occasional environmental /earth science job that pops up in this region.

The effort this is all going to take means that these updates will be even fewer and farther between, but I'll try to post a log entry every once in a while. Can two fortysomething (well, almost) former yuppie-turned-sailing-bums find happiness in hardscrabble self-employmentville?  Stay tuned.