Anyone who has planned a multi-year Cruise has to deal with many of the same hard issues, and at the top of that long list is what to do with all your stuff (or junk) while out Cruising! My first thought was to fake my death and have an estate sale. An estate sale sounds better than a garage sale and tends to bring out a different type of barging hunter. So my first plan was to plaster the area with "estate sale" signs and then open the doors to my "estate" at 7AM with the hopes of seeing everything gone by noon! Unfortunately, my wife didn't quite agree with my plan so it was on to plan B. Of course plan A would have been cheap and easy, which is why I was in favor of it, but I was out voted in a close 1 to 1 vote. I still haven't figured out how it is possible to lose a 1 to 1 vote. Doesn't the Vice President break a tie vote in the Senate? Anyway, Plan B was to store all of our junk, excuse me, all of our valued possessions. The decision then becomes how to store them. First we looked into the standard storage facilities that would rent us a 10ft x 10ft storage cubicle for the bargain price of $150/month and if we needed more space we could "go big" for an extra $75/month and have a 10ft x 20ft unit. I was never great in math, biology was my first love; however, even I could calculate that I would be looking at either $1800/yr or $2700/yr depending on just how much of my precious junk we were going to store! Just to see those numbers in writing still makes my stomach hurt so I then went in search of a better option C.

After looking and scheming, Option C was identified, a 40ft L x 8ft W x 10ft H shipping cargo container for the price of $2700! So for the price of renting 2000 cubic feet for one year, I could purchase 3200 cubic feet and use it for as long as our Cruise lasts! The only catch of option C is to find a place to put the unit. I'm lucky enough to have a close family member (Thanks to my Dad and "little" brother Mark) with a large commercial office space with plenty of room for the storage unit. Now that we have the unit sitting 7 miles away from our house the packing of possessions has begun. If push come to shove, and I'm sure it will as we get closer to our departure date, we could just move our entire house into the cargo unit and totally skip the step of having to decide what stays and what goes. Everything right down to my business suits and the contents of our kitchen pantry could go right into the storage container, thus bypassing what so many have identified as one of the hardest parts of casting off the dock lines, deciding what to do with all their "land lubber junk". I'm sure we will have plenty of stress and mini-disasters as we prepare for our trip, but at least trying to talk my wife Lori into getting rid of her Girl Scout uniform won't be one of them.