Sometimes in life….what you thought might have been your dreams..end up just being a really great day in the sun.
My Protector and I have spent many years fantasizing, discussing and planning two things in our future, and both involve huge sailboats. One is a trip with maybe 3 other of our couple friends on a Greek Sailing cruise. The other is after we retire to own a large yacht, move to Turks and Caicos and sail our life away and charge customers a mint to let us take them out on the gorgeous seas.
Although we are usually pretty good planners, somehow I am not sure that Hubby and I thought this one out too much. We may have been missing some very important and critical elements in realizing our dreams.
It may have been a good idea to actually try going on a a big sailboat for a few hours before committing our futures to them??
We realized today Hobbie Cats which we have both sailed our entire lives are very very different than 47 foot yachts.
So today we had probably one of the most fabulous days of our lives….but trust me we felt good our feet are back on land. Today was AMAZING but believe me I could not commit to this for a lifetime.
It all started out when I told my husband on Day 6 of our vacation that I was starting to feel “restless”.
This always scares him a bit since he never knows what exactly that means since once I get in these moods sometimes they tend to last a long while. So I asked him to book us something extravagant. Since I won an award at work recently that came with money, I decided that I wanted to use it to charter a 47 foot yacht for a half day and sail the turquoise seas. We have wanted to do this forever but never gave in to the incredible expense. I justified it this time with my award and with the fact that I have not consumed alcohol on the trip which saves us tons and tons of money seeing that everyone else around me drink like fish while I have my diet iced tea from the local grocery store in a plastic cup nonetheless.
So my Guy books us the yacht. He is excited as it has been his dream forever.
Yesterday at our hotel, he happens to bump into the Captain’s Girlfriend who also happens to be a sales person at the condos we are staying at at the hotel. They realized “what an amazing coincidence it is that they have been corresponding all week over email trying to book the yacht and there they bump into eachother”!! How sweet!!!!! Adorable.
So she confirms to my Hubby that she is going to join us on the sail since she seemed to get along so well with my husband. Let’s make a day of it-all together! Yay!
Well there goes my beach bum au natural look. I needed to get into shape for this outing. I mean maybe my husband would fall in love with this girl who is not even a wife yet since she owns a yacht. This is his dream right? Maybe he will want to get a head start with this lady?
So I got up an hour early and actually did my hair. Blow-dried it, styled it, curled it. I put on mascara and everything and brought three outfits for the boat. One of my signatures for people who know me well is to change outfits often. I decided that my three cutest outfits would be most appropriate for this sail. I even had two changes of jewelry and sunglasses. The stakes were high-I needed amunitions.
So there we board our yacht at 9:30am this morning looking like our best versions of ourselves, all stylish and fancy and the Girlfriend is the sweetest and most down to earth thing ever. She seemed to have way more interest in me than my Hubby..so I breathed a sigh of relief and took off the tight choker of beads around my neck. How liberating!
So of course being the water lovers we are Hubby and I set up in the front of the boat right on the bow with soft and billowy cushions. The Captain and Girlfriend seemed a bit surprised by our sense of adventure-but my gosh-we have been on boats all our lives! Why would we want to sit on the little benches in the back when we could be up front? We are ONE with water remember? A bunch of mermaids.
Well let me tell you for the next two hours………we were held hostage up there in the bow. The ocean was so rough that we were thrown side to side, water splashing in our faces, me almost falling off the yacht three or four times, salt water in our mouths we were almost choking, three bruised toes from being thrown around so much, sunscreen dripping down our faces with no towel to wipe our eyes. It was ludicrous!!! Scary!
Why did we not crawl back to the back….because we could not endanger our lives to let go for one single second! And no one came to get us or save us! At one point we thought that they had put the boat on auto sail or something and were in the cabin doing the nasty together!
We could not even turn our heads back to see if they were still there 42 feet away as it was to dangerous to look the other way!
But…we LOVED every single minute. We love adventures. We have never laughed so hard in our lives. We were crying (salt tears) and peeing our pants (salt pee) we were laughing so hard. We thought of every single friend we had up there on the bow and poked fun at how we thought they might "enjoy" this cruise themselves. We kept saying can you imagine if so and so were here on this boat?????????? They would be dying! Can you imagine so and so-she would be furious! Can you imagine so and so-he would be barfing! We did this for what seems like hours this same crazy conversation and we laughed.
At first we were worried we might lose our sunglasses overboard. So we laughed. Then we realized we might lose the two pillows. Then we realized we were likely to fall over ourselves-and we cracked up. We especially laughed when we realized there were no life preservers anywhere. Hubby imagined calling home and telling my Mom” You know your daughter’s infected toe you were worried about well don’t worry it’s all fine now at the bottom of the ocean attached to her body! HAHAHA!
Finally the Girlfriend came up for sail from the cabin and asked us if we were “all right up there on the bow” HAHAH. She came and saved us!
Did I mention how we looked by this point? Two wet rats, soaked top to bottom, hair stuck to our faces, my mascara running, and spit all over our clothes.
Time for pictures now-yay!!!!!
So we went back to the stern with her and Captain and my Protector felt sick and almost tossed his cookies! They went to take pictures of us and he is about to throw up all over the poor people. So he had to quickly excuse himself and go back to the bow all by himself poor Guy. He cam back and had some Gravol and some lime soda and was pretty quiet for a while.
I think that ended our dreams somehow of the future. We decided that if we went on a 2 week Greek Cruise with friends we would all never speak to each other again. We decided that if we retired and spent our days on the ocean sailing….we might be in a constant state of giggles and sea sickness. I am thinking that the big Global Pharma company I work for might just have to keep me for a while. I am not retiring anytime soon thank you very much!
The second half of the sail was a lot calmer and better and was actually the most incredible experience, We went swimming in the reefs off the boat, ate a bunch of delicious snacks, hung out with Captain an Girlfriend who were so sweet actually and sailed back home downwind which is a different world. My husband sailed the boat himself for a good amount of time. Back on the bow we were actually able to fall asleep this time and not fall of the side of the boat,
So we loved it (half of it anyways) but we realized that your dreams can’t be half they have to be the whole thing right? My Guy and I realized we are just not the type to do anything half way. Besides just watching the Captain maneuver the sails exhausted us.
So we left that magnificent sail today…kind of changing directions. We were so happy that we did it and will do it again the next trip for sure, but we realized that we need to find a serious new retirement hobby for the future.
I guess we also realized our limitations as we always thought we feared nothing when it came to nature and especially water. Hanging out with Mother Nature today made us feel vulnerable and I feel blessed to be alive and in one piece.
One thing we found out for sure today…is that we have FUN together. I don’t think anyone in the world would have found our jokes very funny (especially all our friends!)but we had a grand old time together.
I realized that I don’t need to have nice hair or many, many outfits to be loved. My husband loved me more with spit and full of pee than with my Gucci bag and Prada sunglasses and I loved every soaked, spit up on, smelly part of him too. We are made to be together.
Sailing will always be part of our life but it won’t be our life as we thought it might. Changing Directions we are…it’s all a heck of a fun journey.
(Oh ya..and they liked us so much that they asked us to be part of a commercial for the hotel and the boat tomorrow. We are going to be TV stars! Guess I better get out the blow dryer and mascara againJ)