Downsizing from a four bedroom house to a 40’ sailboat is not an easy task, to say the least. We finally left Portland January 28 to head east and move aboard Thalia. The last several months prior to that were spent deciding what to do with all the stuff we’d accumulated over many years. Our choices: take to the boat, put in storage, sell, give away, haul across the country to our kids, or trash. We tried to keep as little as possible, as we knew storage on the boat would be minimal and we didn’t want to dump too many boxes on our east coast kids, who are being gracious enough to store some things for us.

We got items destined for Thalia down to 13 small and medium size boxes, plus our diving gear and some miscellaneous tools in other containers. It didn’t seem like all that much stuff at the time. For a chef, bringing aboard only a dozen cookbooks is pretty drastic. And it was painful to not include my Cuisinart, blender, larger sauté pans and saucepans, slow cooker, and all my pretty serving platters and bowls, to name just a few. I know Larry faced similar hardships in deciding which tools and electronics are needed and can reasonably fit onboard.

What we did keep, we loaded onto a 12’ U-Haul trailer that we first drove down to San Francisco - where we spent a few days with my mom and had a really wonderful Bon Voyage party with Marin friends - before hitting the road in earnest. We could only drive 60 mph or less the entire trip, due to the trailer, so it took quite a while to cover the 3,700+ miles between Portland and Oriental, NC. A detour to Sedona to visit friends Mark and Ilana, as well as my sister Rebecca, was another highlight and gave us a chance to cheer Seattle on in the Super Bowl.

After that, though, it was pretty tough going because the weather continued to deteriorate. Until we were well into North Carolina, we dealt with single-digit temperatures, snow and often high winds as we crossed Arizona, New Mexico, the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and finally North Carolina.

Anyone following us on Facebook knows we managed to have some pretty wonderful and often surprising roadside food, including tamales and chicken fried steak with green chile sauce in New Mexico, authentic Ecuadorian food in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and an amazing Memphis BBQ dinner.

In any case, we arrived here late afternoon on schedule on Saturday, February 8. We got our new mattress on the boat, located sheets and blankets, and promptly crashed. Both Sunday and Monday were then spent cleaning and hauling boxes onboard. This we quickly discovered we had to do in phases, because bringing too many boxes into the cabin quickly resulted in a serious bottleneck and left us with no space to put anything. So we unpacked and stowed about a third of our stuff, cleaning as we went, then repeated. Twice. I admit it was a little disheartening to stow away a whole bunch of stuff, pause to admire a clean and tidy galley, then have it look like a bomb hit it an hour later.

The photo here shows the galley with round two of stuff piled high. It was about this point that we realized that 13 small and medium boxes may not have seemed like a lot back in Portland, but sure did onboard Thalia! We ended up getting rid of a few things, but most of it miraculously fit into one spot or another.

That’s the genius of a sailboat: although the space is small, it is incredibly cleverly designed. In addition to the myriad drawers, cabinets and shelves, there are all kinds of surprising cubby holes of various sizes and shapes under and behind seat cushions, under floor boards, and tucked into places I’m sure we haven’t even thought about yet. Our biggest concern now is whether we’ll ever remember where we put everything. We intend to follow our friend Judy’s advice and make an inventory as we continue to settle in onboard.

So, two days later, we’re more or less moved in and Thalia has had a good interior scrubbing. Tomorrow morning we take a short cruise over to a nearby boatyard, where we’re scheduled to have some work done that our insurance company requires. And we’ll have them check out a few other minor issues that have arisen. While Thalia is hauled out and being worked on, we’ll trek north to DC and Baltimore to get rid of the rest of what’s in our car and trailer. We hope to be back on board in another week or so, and will hightail it south toward South Carolina and warmer weather ASAP!

First dinner onboard was what my family calls Julia Child chicken (panko crusted and pan fried in olive oil and butter) along with some greens from a local farmers market and a celebratory bottle of Ayres Oregon pinot noir that made the bumpy ride east with us.

By the way, we loved your comments on the first blog posting and really hope you will all continue to post comments. We are going to really miss all our friends!