Six days until we head for Florida. We are consumed with getting ready for the move. We have to change over all our contact information such as mail, email, internet account, change the phones and the list goes on and on. We're getting out and about to all our doctors and the dentist so we don't have to worry about that for a while. We have three cars other than the truck to "put to sleep" for the duration.

Linda thinks I'm being too anal about the trip planning process and have made excel lists for our "to-dos", for packing box weights and for where each box or item should be located in the truck. Of course the boat "fix it" list is growing too.

No more posts until we hit the road.

2/17/10 - In Seattle

Eleven days to go until we head for St. Petersburg in our 1993 Ford truck loaded like the Beverly Hillbillies. We have developed a detailed list of everything that we plan to take so we don't end up overloaded. We think we can put 750 lbs in the truck and will ship any additional items (currently estimated at 150 lbs.). It's amazing how many things need to be done to unplug from our current life including canceling the Comcast TV cable, the Verizon land line, the Verizon DSL (there goes our email account), etc. etc. We have contracted with a mail forwarding service in Oregon and will have to put out new contact information to all of our friends soon including our new address, email and schedule. We plan to leave on February 28th and our friend Larry Craig is having a send off for us on the 27th. Linda is going to the Vancouver Olympics next week with her brother Bert and nephew Jonathan so she will have a little bread from the fire drill that preparing for the Loop can seem to be. Serenity now! As an experiment to learn how to use this blog, I am inserting a picture of the boat taken during the survey. We're still not sure of the name we ended up with (long story)

2/12/10 - In Seattle

OK, Its February 12, 2010 and we think the boat deal closed today. Our "Looper" is a 1979 45' C&L Sea Ranger. We're not sure of lots of stuff including whether the boat is named the Rain City or the Steelhead. Oh well! Right now we are feeling very unsure that we understand what we have to do to get out of Seattle and whether we are really mentally prepared to be gone for a year. Of course there are always airplanes if we need a break from the boat.

Today we made arrangements for our cell phones and internet on the boat with Verizon. We will cancel our land line at home and we got Linda a new Verizon phone to replace her T-mobile phone (which will be cancelled). We also bought a Verizon "Mifi" which connects to their broadband wireless network and produces a small hot spot for other devices to connect to.

The boat needs lots of work (50 projects identified so far) and we will have less than a month to do the critical ones so we can head out in early April.

Sixteen days until we leave Seattle for St Pete. Still much to do