On the transom of our boat, just below the name and hailing port, there is a picture of a mountain. I presume that the mountain is either Mount Everest or Mount Analogue. The former, because its original owner had been the first American to summit Mount Everest, or the latter, as it had much to do with the origin of the boat’s name: Impossible.
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A few days ago we bought a sailboat. Then we looked around our apartment and thought we don’t need any of this stuff, and so we got rid of it. Pretty much all of it. Within two days, all of our furniture was gone. We gave most of our belongings to the thrift store and I loaded Nacho up with books and drove around the neighborhood filling up the small library boxes in front of houses and on street corners. Then we loaded up our food, cookware, espresso machine, and what clothing was left and said goodbye to land-based living. It bears mentioning that neither of us has ever been sailing before. Been on a sailboat? Once, but it didn’t have any sails.
On a bike ride one day after school in the late nineties, I came across a binder of CDs that had fallen out of someone’s car. Inside there were albums by Pearl Jam, Blind Melon, Candlebox, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden, among others—the music that would form the soundtrack to my high school years, and which I still love. I was profoundly awestricken, then, to find myself standing in the very recording booth in a Seattle recording studio where all of those iconic records were recorded. In the very place where Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and so many others had belted out the soundtrack to my life, I now stood completely adulterating the image of this sacred place with ill-executed accents of Latin Americans, Asians, Turks, and Sheena.
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Not long after Remy was born, and being late for one of his routine doctor’s appointments, we ran to the garage to get the car and on the way noticed that in the space where our beloved mountain bikes had once been locked, there existed only emptiness.
“Where in the hell are our bikes?” I half yelled, staggering, Remy under one arm as I fumbled for my keys. “Dammit, blah! Let’s deal with this later!” Remy was due for vaccinations, and the fact that several thousand dollars’ worth of bikes had been stolen by a nefarious-looking man with calloused knuckles and cauliflower ears was too much to consider. Calloused knuckles? Cauliflower ears? Well now, I’m getting ahead of myself.
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One year ago, we found out that Sheena was pregnant. There was one February day when we decided that we’d done what we wanted to do in this phase of life, so we might as well start trying to reproduce ourselves. I looked forward to what would surely be several months of trial and error, but one enchanting evening later Sheena was in a motherly way.
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Expedition Portal recently awarded us the 2015 Overlanders of the Year! We are honored and humbled by this recognition, and hope that our story inspires more to get out on the open road, doing what makes you happy. We’ve reprinted the story from ExPo below, written by Christophe Noel.
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When I was twelve years old, while sleeping on the floor of my dad’s living room, I had a dream that caused me to fall irrationally in love with Seattle. I had never been to Seattle, and had only a vague idea of its whereabouts (America). In the dream, and in recalling it afterward, I felt a complete sense of liberation. I was a fully autonomous and independent twelve-year-old without a care in the world, and I freely roamed the streets with a gang of other twelve-year-olds amid the deep snows of the Seattle winter. This demonstrates how little I knew about Seattle. In my dream, Seattle had been in the midst of an arctic winter, and I, along with my cohort of street kids, were whisked about the city on its efficient public transit system. This assumption of public transit furthermore demonstrates how little I knew of Seattle.
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