Six years and roughly eight thousand nautical miles after we left Duluth, Minnesota intending to sail to Key West we have finally arrived! We are now at the southernmost point in the US, mile zero on US 1, and only 90 miles from Cuba. This is it...as far south as we will go on this cruise. When we leave here next week, our latitude will be increasing, and the distance to home decreasing...

After almost three weeks in Boot Key Harbor, we radioed the marina at 0815 this morning and informed them we had dropped our mooring and were departing the area. It was a long and completely uneventful 40 miles of motorsailing to Key West and I spent most of it below decks doing my work. But as we had dinner at a dockside/poolside restaurant this evening, we commented on how far we've come that a forty-mile day such as this could seem so uneventful... preparations, departure, sailing, navigation, communications, docking, all were just comfortable, familiar routines that we just do.

Evelyn has to go home for a week so our plan is to send her off on Saturday evening and then Anne, Leslie, and I will spend the week cruising up to Fort Myers on Florida's west coast to meet her return flight. I the meantime, we have a couple of days here to explore the historic town and try to ignore the industrial-strength tourism that seems to have proliferated in the decade-plus since I was last here.

The funny thing is that when I was last here, it was also by sailboat but it was as part of the cruising sailing course that I took back when we first started to take up sailing. Even then I muttered to myself that I'd come back someday in my own boat...I've hardly been single-minded in pursuing that goal, and I couldn't have conceived of the journey that would eventually lead me back here, but I'm glad it did.