Taking the Long Way Around

Tiffany:

So it’s that time again for Greg to take the mic for his birthday message:

 

Greg:

2 years ago today I wrote you  from a remote island in the middle of French Polynesia in between diving lessons.

Last year my birthday found us still in the Pacific, but at least now having sailed on to a different island and learning to surf.

Even now both Tiffany and I find ourselves looking at maps of the world attempting to wrap our minds around some of the things we’ve done.  Did we really sail to Tahiti?  Did I actually have a role in sci-fi movie?  Have we really created almost 200 integrated video blog posts?  Seriously, we managed to find wine made from bananas?  We can play Jingle Bells on the ukulele?  And did it took us 20 minutes of bashing a coconut before we realized the machete was dull?

Did I actually convince my wife that creating from scratch and wearing a genuine coconut bikini was:

1) Something worth doing and

2) Important to document videographically?

This picture encapsulates awesome.

Odd as it sounds, even to us now, the answer to those questions and so many other amazing adventures is “Yes.”

As we’ve told a few of you the good news is that we are now and at this very moment on our way home.

And the better news (or bad, for the moms and our long separated cat) is that’s we’re taking the long way around.

As in through Asia.

And we’re eschewing airline transport.

We plan to find a boat to cross that over-glorified river between America and Europe we’re forced to call an “ocean” to keep all the East Coast people happy.

Now, we should add that the ORIGINAL plan had us flying to Australia and returning after a year and we all see how that worked out…

So it might be a while.

 

Why did we decide to go overland through Asia?

Wasn’t this supposed to just be a one year gig?

Why are you deciding to end this now?

Whatever shall you do when you get back?

Where will you go what will you do and how the heck did you afford this?

 

Questions all to be answered in good time.

As for the blog itself, after almost 3 years of work Tiffany and I find it’s at about where we want it to be.

(Yes, there’s a time delay but that gap will close and the buffer is helpful when wandering though countries that block access to YouTube and the internet and whatnot.  ‘Sides, the story’s the thing here and neither Tiffany nor I are willing to rush through the telling of a good tale.)

• The “wines of the world” has morphed into the Grog Files and we’re both pretty happy about that.

• The How to Crew page has had some great expansion.  We’d like to see more though so please keep the questions coming!

• We didn’t get up the “Recipes you can prepare quickly and easily in a howling gale at sea” section.  Hmm…not sure if we’re gonna or not.  Thoughts?  Interest?

• The MAP is finally up, running and linked to all of our entries.  It also pays homage to Tiffany’s and my video gamer roots; a source of personal pride.  Again, this was a huge lift of time and effort for Tiffany so many props to her for this.

• We also changed platforms, used add-ons and all sorts of other things that Tiffany understands way better than I do.

All of these are ongoing projects and the important thing is that the structure is there.  Articles have places and are put there.  While we may move the way things are presented in the coming year, the core concepts are now present, developed and working.

If there’s something we’re missing please do let us know.  Also, we’d both really like to know what you all think of this site.  What works and what doesn’t.

We haven’t spent as much time on promotions as we like and that was a conscious choice.  After working at it a bit last year we realized that writing a blog is quite a lot of work but nowhere near the amount of work writing and promoting a blog is.  And to maintain an online presence in the blog sphere in environments that have, at best, a “shaky” internet connection is an exercise in frustration that we are unwilling to accept.  So it came down to the clutch question: “why are we writing this blog?”

Well, our initial reason for taking handy cams with us was to document our experiences for our own selves.  We figured we we’re doing something that would be worth looking back on in detail in the coming years so we started taking videos.

Then we thought we would start posting online so that everyone could see what we were doing.

Then we figured out that videos with explanations were the way to go.

Then people started asking us how we managed to sail across the South Pacific for free and off the blog went.  Most of you seemed to like it and the format  gave us the chance to relive and record not only what we did but our thoughts about what we experienced, which was a big value add for us (and probably you all as well.)

The twice a week posting schedule was created to make us actually keep writing and get things done and even then it’s been a struggle at times to make the entries happen.  That being said I’m actually really proud of us in that we’ve posted just about every single time we were scheduled to.  I’d go back and confirm that we’ve actually never missed an entry by paging though the entire blog but honestly?  That’s a lot of entries to dig though.

About 200 of them.  Wow.

So the blog’s original intent was to document what we were doing vice become what we are doing.

For now, we rely upon you, dear readers, to word-of-mouth this thing and we really appreciate every like we’ve gotten, every follower and most especially your comments, questions and interactions.  10,000 hits in a single month is a lot more than we were expecting.   While we would probably write this blog either way, it’s nice to have someone who talks back from time to time.  If there is any way we can make that easier for you again, please let us know.

Will we be writing this blog in a few years?  Is there a book in all this?  Don’t know.  Those things would take an investment of time and energy and whether or not we decided to make that investment largely depends on why we would do it.

Right now we’re documenting our adventure for our own amusement, sharing the stories with you because we like to stay connected, answering your questions because secretly (or not so secretly) we really would like to get the word out about this method of travel.  It’s awesome and easily within reach of anyone.

Thank-you for giving us the gift of your participation and making this thing even more special for us.

 

About the authors

Greg and Tiffany are traveling around the world on sailing yachts and keep a video blog of their (mis)adventures.  If sailing to Tahiti on a 44 ft sailboat, 3-day delays for wine tastings, getting pooped on by seagulls, opening coconuts with dull machetes, sailing past tornadoes and ukulele Christmas carols are for you, then check them out at www.CoastGuardCouple.com!