Milestones

Position: 29°1.086’N 13°37.572’W

This week was going to be about Morocco. After a month’s travel through that dry and wondrous country we have so much more to tell you than what we’ve already posted. But something else happened and it’s kind of pushed everything else to one side. Rather than keep you waiting and spinning out a long story leading up to our discovery, I’ll just come out and say it (get on with it – ed.). Yesterday, almost eight years to the day after we left Solomons, Maryland, we passed the 25,000-mile mark on Aleta. That’s 25,000 nautical miles. For you landlubbers that’s 28,769.4862005875 statute miles or 46,300 kilometres. For reference, the circumference of the Earth at its equator is 24,901 statute miles. Put another way, we’ve sailed across North America every year for the past eight years. What’s more is Aleta has averaged over five knots during her journey.

Boasting about how many miles we’ve travelled on Aleta isn’t really our thing. For some sailors, ticking off miles is more important than diving into foreign cultures or following your whims down a backroad in a country whose language you can’t begin to fathom. Nevertheless, for eight years the chartplotter has stored our track and stored our mileage. At one point a software update interrupted the continuous distance record, so we continued calculating the total with a SWAG.

Then, 50 miles off the Moroccan coast the other night, I touched an area on our Raymarine chartplotter that I’d never touched before. It displayed the total number of miles we’d sailed since we’ve owned Aleta. We were a little awed.

Swallows

25,000 is an important milestone for reasons other than it being a long-ass journey. It is two times 5,000 miles longer than 15,000 miles. 15,000 miles was around the time we both got our first tattoos. By tradition sailors get a swallow tattoo every 5,000 miles. Between us we have three swallows. Carol has a beautiful and colourful one on her forearm and I have two on my left shoulder. Now we need two more. We think we’re going to get one each and put them on our wrists so that they can kiss when we hold hands. (If you think eight years of living in a 350 square foot floating RV might stifle the romance in our relationship, you’d be dead wrong.)

Questions

Folks ask us, ‘What’s the best place you’ve visited?’ Then they quickly admit their question is an impossible one to answer, thereby saving us the effort of pointing out that indeed their question is impossible for us to answer. So far we’ve visited 28 countries on Aleta and made Marlon one of the world’s best travelled dogs. That total goes up by another five-ish if you include our off-Aleta excursions and you count the Pacific Northwest as a separate country. (Which in fairness it is – ed.)

Each place we visit, no matter for how long, is an opportunity to try and lift the lid off the typical tourist experience. Travelling by foot is, for us, the best way to appreciate a place. Next comes by pressing our feet onto bicycle pedals and lastly an automobile accelerator. Whichever method we employ, there is nothing better than escaping crowds of selfie-junkies and popping up somewhere unexpectedly profound. Especially when we can shake the sand or snow off of our shoes at the end of the day.

Thanksgiving!

After five days at sea off the coast of Africa, passing an Earth-sized milestone really feels like something our parents would have appreciated. Blogging hacks might write that life isn’t about the destination, but about the journey. This blogging hack would prefer to thank the village that fosters our success. Truly, without the encouragement and support of our families and friends we wouldn’t be here. And we wouldn’t feel as fulfilled and happy as we do at this moment. At this milestone. It feels pretty damn cool! Thanks for following along – there’s so much more to come!