Imagining a boat in Florida (Florida Boating, Post 1)

I left off yesterday muttering about the snow in Tucson. (Snow! Snow is not why I moved to Tucson!) “We’re so outta here,” I said. “We’re done. We’re gone. Florida, here we come!” The reason why that amused me so much is that John and I have actually decided to go to Florida. No, I didn’t say we were moving there, lol, I know we’re bad, but we’re not that bad! We’ve only been in Tucson for 3 months! Give us a year at least!

No, we’re driving to Florida for a visit. “That doesn’t sound much better,” you say. “How many days of driving to get all the way to Florida?” Several. Probably five. We’re going to drive to Florida towing our boat. “Uh-huh. For fun?”

Here’s the thought process. We have a boat that we almost never used in deserts of New Mexico, and realistically probably will also never use in the deserts of Arizona. For a bunch of reasons specific to our particular boat (which I will talk more about soon), the perfect place for that boat is the Florida Keys.

When we were trying to decide where to move, Florida did hit our list of possibilities, but it was never a top contender for a lot of reasons. It continues to be, however, the best place for our boat.

Meanwhile, now that I’m feeling a fair amount better, we want to go on a big vacation. But we don’t want to fly until we are vaccinated. That means a road trip in our trusty camper van! And the warmest destination in the continental US in February is southern Florida. And if we’re going to take a long road trip anyway (so our logic goes), we might as well use the time to drag our boat to Florida. And leave it there! Then, when life is normal again (if life is ever normal again) all we would have to do is hop on a plane and ta-da, we’ve got a boat waiting for us in Florida!

We’re not actually sure how often that would realistically happen. So we aren’t going to leave it bobbing in an expensive slip, vulnerable to hurricanes. We’re going to find a cheap place somewhere inland to dry-dock it (sitting on its trailer in an outdoor storage lot).

We think our boat will feel a lot more at home sitting on its trailer in Florida than sitting on its trailer in Tucson. We’re not sure if we’ll end up using it out there or not. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up dragging that boat back again to wherever we are in a couple of years. We definitely seem to do more dragging that boat around than sailing it. But it’s worth a try!

About 25 years ago I spent a week in the Florida Keys on a tiny little sailboat about the same size as ours. It was rather amazing.

Unfortunately, due to two major computer crashes over the decades, and catastrophic water damage during one of our many moves, this is, oddly, the only picture from that long-ago trip that survives. Laura had a scanned copy, and had entitled it, “freckledmom”. I would have been in my late twenties.

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