Getting Started

Charlottesville Virginia

I left my job at the University of Virginia 3 days ago and will be on the road in the direction of my father's 60th birthday in another 4 days.  Everything has happened very quickly as things are want to do once you make up your mind what exactly you want and get some of those good vibe feelings behind it.

The story of how I got here is a long one which I'll shorten to the recent and the basic.  All the "dreams come true" in my life start with a sense of longing.  Even if I'm currently in what was my dream, it seems that after a while a new vista opens up that I want to explore.

I lived for over 20 years on a beautiful farm I'd discovered in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside of Charlottesville Virginia.  Over time my husband and I restore the old farm house, planted, nurtured, preserved and prepared about 80% of our food organically.  We had Eight 100 square foot vegetable beds, a corn patch, a strawberry patch, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, a grape arbor, an herb garden, fish pond and apple, apricot, peach, plum and pear trees.  We were back to the land. 

After my daughter left for college, I wanted to try living in our local college town where I worked at the university in order to be closer to social events and not have to drive so far to work.  So I moved to a sweet quiet little street where I could walk to work, walk to the gym, our historic downtown mall and the local shopping center.  A perfect location.  Over the next 9 years I moved from my first little rental, across the street to my second and finally down the street to a house identical to the first two which I bought from her son when my friend Louise died at age 91.  At 800 square feet all the houses were easier to take care of and I loved the location, my neighbors and neighborhood.  I put the berries and herbs on the backyard slope and vegetables in a raised bed.

At this point I'd worked at one thing or another for quite enough time I was beginning to feel and wanted out of the rat race, the politics and the posturing.  Although too young to retire, with too little income, I really wanted to and so I took a deep breath and I did.   This desire came about as part of my increasing longing to be nearer the water and from missing the closeness to the natural world.  Wonderful as my location was, there were still too many ambulance sirens, lawn mowers, weed whackers and other loud engines and not enough wildlife (other than some of the college students).

I had attempted to solve the closer to wildlife problem by getting a kayak and doing neighboring lakes and rivers.  But after a year or so, I'd done them all and traveled to all the nearby possibilities as well.  Not too many when you are in the foothills 3 hours from the shore.   And so my dissatisfaction with my job and longing to have more places to hike and kayak turned into a dream of kayaking the marshes and wetlands near the coastline of the country.  Not whitewater or ocean kayaing (or at least not yet) but flatwater on the rivers, streams and wetlands that surround coastal waters.  

To do that, I'd have to have freedom of time and movement.  To have A, I'd have to leave my job and figure out how to live on half the income I currently had.   To do B, given A, I'd have to camp.  Sounded great.  I'd been a life long camper and backpacker.  Our family took long trips through New England to Nova Scotia and PEI, all along the Great Lakes and over to North Dakota, tent camping all the way.  But at this point in my life I wasn't sure sleeping on the ground in a tent was the way to go given how long I wanted to be "gone kayakin'".      I'll finish all this tomorrow.  See you then.