Tiffany and Greg Around the World
You want the real secret we used to find ships to travel around the world with? How we were able to find a ride in Tahiti before we even pulled into port? Well, here it is:
Find a fleet. Travel with it. Make friends.
That’s it.
Wait, find a fleet? What the heck does that mean? Are we joining the Spanish Armada here or going for a vacation?
Continue reading “Find a fleet”
Ok so after deciding the cruising thing is for you,
Testing it out and finding you like it
And deciding that you, for starters at least, will grab a ride with a costal cruiser
You’re oh so patiently waiting for us to tell you how to find your first freaking boat!
Ah, but if you’ve done everything we suggested so far you already have started looking!
Yeah, how’s that for a little sailor-Yodaism?
Continue reading “Getting your first crew gig”
One of several murals over the urinals in Oktoberfest beer tents.
Who do these people think they are, Kiwis!?
We did our very best to have as authentic an experience as we could at Oktoberfest
Continue reading “Lederhosen!”
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?
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”
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!
Melbourne, VIC, AU
Then one day about a month into it, we woke up and realized that cleaning up horse poop at 3:45am 6 days a week sucks. In our defense, we were kinda tired that month so it took a while.
Now that were done “playing with horses” we actually had the time to start exploring this town. Melbourne is one of Australia’s largest cities. It didn’t occur to us what that would mean to two people who spent the previous year wondering around island countries with national populations smaller than most European villages.
Melbourne, VIC, AU
Unbeknownst to us, this job put us smack into the middle of the backpacker working trail and as a result, our workmates were not who we expected. In what we anticipated to be a primarily Australian work group we found ourselves surrounded by 2 Kiwis, 3 Germans, a Sweede, 2 French, a Scott, 2 Americans (us) and a paltry 5 Australians. The foreigners outnumbered the locals by more than 2:1. Also the overwhelming majority of employees were female or as Greg put it to his unmarried brother Chris,
“Dude, wanna meet a bunch of young European Cowgirls?”
“Then come to Australia.”
Continue reading “Mostly European Cowgirls”
