From 2003 to 2007, over 1,333 days, Ali and I sailed 33,800 miles and visited 42 countries while becoming circumnavigators of the globe.
This trip was the beginning of this website and really the beginning of the rest of our lives. It all started here:
It was November of 2002 and Ali and I were sitting at Lou Malnatti's, our favorite pizza place in Chicago. It's also a bar, and as we sat there later and later into the night we started to talk about our future. We had moved to Chicago three years earlier so I could be where the action was in the commodities business and we had done pretty well for ourselves since then. Now we were 28 and feeling the tug of the suburbs. Most of our friends had already started the process of having kids and buying a home an hour away from the city and we were half-heartedly contemplating falling in line. But that night, over a few pitchers of cheap beer and delicious pizza, we started to think that it might be more fun to just take off, blow some money, and some time. We could always come back to work and there was still plenty of time to have the kids we wanted.
That night we came to a decision. We were going to buy a powerboat and cruise around the Caribbean for a year. I had just come across a website that had done exactly that and it sounded like fun. Within days we had a whole bunch of books on the subject around the house and were scouring the internet for more research. Then I read Sailing Promise about a couple exactly our age who had bought a small catamaran and sailed it around the world. It sounded great, why not do that? Okay, maybe the fact that neither of us had ever stepped foot on a sailboat in our lives should have been a consideration, but we'd always been successful at doing whatever we set our minds to do, so why should this be any different?
I finished the book and set the question to Ali. Her response was, "If you feel like we can do it, then sure, why not. Besides I was starting to think that it seemed like a lot of work to sell all of our stuff for just a one year trip." And from that moment the scope of the trip changed from buzzing through a chain of islands in the Caribbean to a four year odyssey around the world in a sailboat.
