As poor as I am at being a public blogger, I actually do have a private blog that I update, on average, daily. I actually write a lot in there. This is the kind of entry that would go in that blog.
So, I’m in Chicago, and will be leaving for Seattle at some point this week. This stop has been a very different one from Boston.
When I decided to do this trip, the largest part of my reasoning was “because I can.” There was still a part of me who knew that something else was going on. I relate this to a similar situation where I went on a 3 month road trip last year, but didn’t know why I went on it until a few months after it was over.
This time, instead of the trip being over before figuring it out, I figured it out much faster and realized that this trip was simply a holding period until I figured out what I wanted to do next. And I got a sense of that 3 weeks into my Boston trip, that quickly formalized over the later weeks.
I’ve wanted to live on a boat for quite some time now. I always imagined having an older 40+ foot motor yacht that I’d tool around in. That was, until a friend came back from a weekend sailing trip to Maine, and mentioned that “we could have been in the Bahamas in 4-5 days.”
That was enough to solidify for me the idea that what I really wanted was a sailboat.
Even though I’ve never been on a sailboat in my life.
And that I wanted to sail.
A lot.
Since making the decision, I’ve been working 12-15 hour days, 6 days a week, with the seventh day being reserved for tooling around Chicago with some good friends I have up here. Even on those days, I end up returning home to work. And all the time I’m working, it never feels like it’s “work,” even though some of it is so mundane and repetitive and boring that even a saint might find himself cursing God.
It soon became apparent to me that I not only wanted to sail, but that I was also very gladly putting in the work to make it happen. I’ve been reading sailing manuals and accounts of around-the-world sailing, setting up passive income streams, and finalizing some things for my consulting offers that will, hopefully, allow me to more comfortably afford to both buy a boat, and to sail for quite some time.
This has brought me to a point of figuring out how to continue with this trip. The traveling, while awesome and enjoyable, is becoming a distraction and, at times (like right now when I’ll be in Seattle in less than a week, with still no place to live), a burden to what I really want to be doing.
So, I’ll leave this post there. I will be updating with accounts of several awesome Boston events and people, along with some great days here in Chicago, at some point. In the meantime, I’ve since updated my flickr account with some pictures of the Chicago Air Show, the Boston ICA, etc.