"Hey Jim, I hear you guys are going on a trip! What’s going on?" A typical conversation I’ve had at the office a thousand times in the last few months.

"Well, we are shipping our boat to Milwaukee and then going to the Bahamas and the Caribbean." I get back a blank stare. I can see the gears spinning in their mind as they try to comprehend a route to the Caribbean from Lake Michigan.

"Oh! You are taking the Mississippi or something like that?"

"No, we are going to do one half of something called The Great Circle. We will travel north, up Lake Michigan, and through a part of Lake Huron called The North Channel. The we will cross Canada in a canal called the Trent-Severn, take the Erie Canal to the Hudson River, turn right at New York City, and then down the East Coast of the U.S. on a route called the Intra-Coastal Waterway (ICW) to Florida. That will take 6 months. Then we will go to the Bahamas for the winter. After that, the plans are a little fuzzy right now…."

After this question has been asked and answered, people usually ask a majority of the following questions into what turns into about an hour long conversation.

By the way, the typical, well educated, professional American in California does not have an understanding of the Great Lakes, where they are, how they are connected, they could not name 3 of them, they don’t know about any canals in North America, or the ICW on the East Coast. About 99% of the people we talk to ask questions as if we were announcing a non-stop ocean voyage to Antartica (in winter).

"What are you going to do with the house?"

"Karen’s step-mom, Judy, is coming to live in the house, feed the dogs, take care of things, and answer the phones for Starrstuff, Inc. while we are away."

"Oh, speaking of Starrstuff, what is going to happen to your business?"

"Nothing, our web sites can run themselves while we are gone, Judy can do the invoices and banking, and we are taking our computers, cell phones, modems, and digital cameras with us. We are not going to Mars, and we’ll be back in a year or so."

"What about the children?"

"Amy and Heidi each have about a cubic foot of storage for toys, and we have all their books and educational materials for 4^th and for 6^th grade from the Calvert School. A major part of this adventure is going to be "home" schooling for a year. I will work with them on geography, mapping, navigation and the history of where we are visiting every day. Karen will teach the Calvert School lessons. We have several boxes of books for them. We are going to Canada, Washington DC., New York City, Baltimore, Charleston, Miami, and the Exuma Cays. They will learn!"

Now, at this point, people always ask about the boat: how much fuel, water, range, speed, how many people can sleep aboard, what kind of engines and so on. Let’s just put it this way. Indiscipline is a 1985 Wellcraft Californian 35. She is 40 feet overall, with twin Caterpillar 3208 210 HP diesels, and carries 300 gallons of fuel. She has a range between 300 and 500 miles, carries 75 gallons of water, and a 45 gallon holding tank (no one ever asks about the toilet). We can cruise at 15 knots, but we will spend much of the time at 7 or 8. She can sleep the 4 of us OK, and we can stretch for a couple of guests. We also have a generator and 5 batteries. Like the toilet, we get very few questions on the electric systems. The average person does not think about AC and DC power systems. But toilet and batteries are two of my greatest engineering concerns! We have a dinghy with an 8 HP Nissan outboard.

"Oh! You mean you don’t have a sailboat?"

"No, we are going on a power boat". If the person we are talking to is a sailor, they generally lose interest about now. They might say something like: "That’s not a real cruise – you are just harbor hopping across the country." If I hear that, I ask them to take a look at a map of our planned 3000 mile route, and say that we will be anchoring out often. But most people just plow right ahead, and ask if we have a radio, GPS, anchor, or maps and charts.

"Yes, we have 3 VHF radios (1 is a portable), 2 FRS radios, a Marine Single Side Band (SSB) receiver, radar, GPS chart plotter, sonar (fishfinder), depthfinder, and charts / guidebooks for Lake Michigan to Florida. We carry 3 anchors, extra rope, 2 laptop computers, cell phone, and cell phone modem."

From this point on, we get all kinds of wild questions: