…fools and their plans

Today is our wedding anniversary, you know “only fools marry again” so April fools day seemed a good choice for a wedding date… plus it was a palindrome (4/1/14)!

We are ever the fools! We waited and waited and waited for my passport, called the passport office, lost hours of my life on those extended 6 hour plus holds… so we decided we needed a new plan. Maybe it would be summer before the passport even arrived. So we found a new plan, but it didn’t include the Bahamas for now, FOR NOW!

There is a horror film titled “Pig Hill” that is being shot in Meadville, PA about 45 miles south of Erie. Many of Stew’s film friends will be working on the film and he was offered the position of camera operator… so he took the job. Changing our trajectory from the beautiful Bahamas to the cold shores of northwestern PA.

The salt in the wound was 15 minutes after he accepted the offer the passport office called (yes, and they didn’t even put me on an extended hold!!) to verify my new mailing address for the passport (now being sent to Erie) and that I should get it in the next few days! WHAT!!! I mean really! The universe was playing an early April fools joke on us!! I will tell you, it has now been a few days and I have not yet seen the tracking information that was promised… so maybe it’s not really on the way quite as soon as promised, and we would still be waiting.

The other thing is even once I have the passport we will need to move down to No Name bay ( south of Miami) and wait for a weather window to cross. Many people have told us, this could be a week or more!! So we still won’t arrive in Bahamas until mid April or even later. Plus for us already waiting a month, we needed to top up provisions and get some larger wash done, fill tanks etc. oh yea, and lots of the fishing we wanted to do closed April 1st in the Bahamas! No lobster fishing!

Ok, so now we are embracing the “new plan”. We need to leave Florida by April 11th. Move the boat 200 miles north to Titusville, FL, our proven hurricane hole, install a new shore charger for our batteries (ours failed about a month ago), prep the boat for hurricane season, deal with 3 mo of food that we provisioned for the Bahamas, get my moms 2nd car over in Tampa, pack for cold weather (and hot as we might just jump to another job), and not go crazy in the process. first little glitch is our faithful marina can’t take our boat until April 9th so we will have to already deviate from the way we planned the new plan! But we are just happy they’ll take us!

Stew is of course very excited about working again, esp with his friends. I will have the joy of seeing my grandson, Arlo and hanging with my Erie friends. My friend Mary already offered to put me up for the month (Stew will stay in Meadville)! The Bahamas will be there next year (hopefully I’ll have my passport by then), but this opportunity for Stew will not.

I love this life we have chosen but have found flexibility is key. You plan and plan things and all of a sudden life sends you down a different path… the saying “we make plans, God laughs” could not be more real in our life!

We are getting excited about this new plan, stick around and see how this all goes… I’m sure there will be twists and turns on up the road!

… and no, this is not an April fools joke… but it would’ve been a great one!