Tiffany and Greg Around the World
As we’ve said some things are just too time sensitive to wait.
The first was when we managed to make it to the London 2012 games and even scored tickets to what we came to call “The North-American Throwdown.”
This time we find ourselves at another festival of human endurance:
Continue reading “Oktoberfest!”
Sailing around the world for free on someone else’s luxury yacht sounds like a doable thing for you huh? You took our advice on how to test the waters with sailing and did a local trial class or joined the local racing team and now you’ve had you can confidently say you know your way around a beer can race? (hey, that’s what it’s actually called!)
You got that first taste of salt in the air and it tasted so good you decided you might just want to follow that breeze to a sunny beach somewhere. A beach perhaps where the cerveza is cheap and the locals provide a really comprehensive foreign language immersion experience?
You’re ready to go, so what’s next?
As we’ve previously stated, friendships lead to a lexicon whose size is directly proportional to the time invested in the relationship. These lexicons lead to key phrases that communicate much more than the simple words involved when we are lucky enough to have been together long enough to be “in the know.”
It’s not just shared experiences like stumbling up the towering mountains of New Zealand that create this shared vocabulary. Another source of this insiders verbiage is simply and consistently hashing out the meaning of words over time. Because while two people may speak the same language, they probably don’t use the same words to describe the same things. Example: what might be “cool” to one person may be “wicked” to another (“phat” could also be substituted.) Though these words may be synonyms, there are variations of meaning that make each more appropriate at different times.
There is a difference between something that is “gross” and something else that is “disgusting.” The choice of using either of these words describes more than just that fact that something is repulsive; there are nuances (for a 12 year old boy “gross” might be a good thing).
As a married couple (or anyone building a joint vocabulary) it is important to nail down these subtle differences in word use to more effectively communicate with each other.
We ran into this particular nugget of nuptial knowledge when Tiffany started calling Greg “cute.” She meant it as a compliment and Greg took it as a bit of an insult. Then Tiffany got confused:
Tiffany – “But you’re good looking. That means you’re cute!”
Greg – “No. Bunnies, baby horses and Mini Coopers are cute. I am not.”
It was at this point that a working definition of the word “cute” had to be established…
That is, in and of itself a very big deal and worth a moment of reflection. Nine years is no small thing.
People look at us differently than they did when we said we’d been together, for example, 3 years. They look at us like we achieved something beyond hanging out with a best friend (who also happens to be really physically attractive) for years at a time. Evidently at some point we passed a marker. It’d be nice if they put signs on those things or something. They don’t look at us like the cute old couple who’d been married for 50 years yet, so we’re led to believe there are additional, similarly unmarked, waypoints out there. Stay tuned for updates as we stumble over them.
The next point here is (yeah, we’re kinda free thought writing here, just roll with it 😉 that we’re actually upon the cusp of opening a bottle of Italian wine that we have been cellaring for a decade! A DECADE! Come on, that’s got be a big deal! Exactly 354 days from now we’ll be able to intelligently speak of Tuscan Crociani reds and the variances of their tastes when consumed immediately, at 5 years and at 10 years.
We’ve cellared wine. Kept it even. Purchased it but not opened it. For years. Many of them (years, not wines. At least yet). In a sequential order.
That’s a sign of maturity right?
We need to pick out a new wine for our little family tradition but don’t worry, we have a few candidates in mind…all from New Zealand oddly enough…
Finally it occurred to us that, by the numbers, we have spent a full third of our married life on this little adventure. That, also, is no small thing and it’s given us some insight so we thought we would put on the “couple” hat and answer a question we sometimes get –
Continue reading “Married Vagabonds”
As many of you know the main question we get when it come to how get started as volunteer crew is how to deal with seasickness.
The second most often asked question is similar to the one Mike asked us a few weeks ago:
“All signs in my life point towards the adventure you two have chosen. My top two bucket list items right now are live on a boat and sail around the world. I thought these would be goals for much (much) later in life but as a 27 year old I think the time is now.
Do you have any advice for savings needed for say, 1 year of volunteer sailing?”
Well, yes, yes we do…
Continue reading “But how much does it cost!?”
OK, it’s not what we focus on here and it’s out of the timeframe of the blog but Alexi asked real nice, gave us a place to sleep for the night and showed us where to get the best dang dumplings we’ve pretty much EVER HAD so we’re gonna pay him back and review his hostel for him.
Now, you could easily say this review is predicated on the fact that he gave us a free night at his hostel (that’s called disclosure people) but we’d contest that being as we actually stayed there for about a week and paid full price for the privilege to do so.
The first thing you need to understand about Russia: the hostels are not what you are expecting. In America, or, at least, in our experience of our home country, “hostels” are scary places where homeless drug addicts live. The rest of the world, not so much.
Russia is unique however because their hostels are not, by far and large, buildings that are actually purpose built for mass housing. The overwhelming majority of Russian hostels are actually converted soviet-era apartments.
Which, if you’re a cold-war nerd like Greg, is fan-FREAKING-tastic! We got to stay in a converted soviet-era cold war apartment! Come on, that’s cool!
Continue reading “Chillax Hostel”
Those extra 2 weeks we spent in Opua were put to good use. Since we had a paying gig this time, we didn’t just take off and go exploring ashore. Instead, we did boat work. What kind of boat work? The yucky kind. Observe:
But this article wasn’t titled “passing grey water” was it?
No, no it was not and for good reason…
So there we were (doesn’t every great story start that way?) in Coff’s Harbour and little did we know that this would be the end of our Australian East Coast Adventure.
[fgallery id=11 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”Great Australian East Coast Adventure”]
We were doing a bit of work at a hostel in exchange for accommodation, deciding what our next move was going to be and looking at the boats available on FindACrew.net. Huh. Imagine that! There was a boat in New Zealand looking for a couple of crew to help deliver it to Australia! We got in touch with the owner, who was willing to pay us to fly out to his boat so he could get it delivered to a transport ship in Brisbane and sent back home to the US.
He seemed like a decent guy on the phone and since he paid for the flight, we decided to take a risk and were off back to New Zealand!
Ok, we all know why Greg says he’s from San Francisco right?
So what he didn’t mention was that this habit started when he was in at the Coast Guard Academy and the following conversation inevitably followed from meeting a new person at school:
The last time we went on a hike with Dan a new phrase was seared into our joint lexicon to represent a task of monumentally herculean proportions and nigh unbearable pain: Kiwi Moderate.
So the take away catch phrase for our next joint adventure through the blue mountains?
Continue reading “Many Steep Steps”
