A New Plan: The Van Life Diaries 1

Updated on May 24th, 2024

There is one thing that living and cruising on a sailboat for the last four years has taught me. Flexibility. It does not come naturally to me but practice makes perfect. When pretty much everything about your life is at the mercy of Mother Nature you get pretty good at rolling with punches.

Well, we’ve received a few punches recently! Let me start by getting you up to speed and then we will chat about what’s next 😉

Winter in Maine

When we returned from our second cruising season in the Bahamas last year we were running pretty low on funds. We’ve always known at somepoint we would need to take a break from traveling to work and refill the cruising kitty. The purchase of Acadia in 2021 certainly sped up that need but we wouldn’t change that decision for the world!

We started brainstorming the easiest way for us to make money and it made the most sense was for Andy to increase his consulting hours and for me to go back to work in corprate education/instructional design. For reasons I won’t get into, for me to work for my previous employer we had to be stationary. We have missed winter and Maine so it was a pretty easy choice to head hoME.

There was another motiviation for us taking the winter off from cruising and that was some health concerns. I had been having some GI issues since about November 2022 and I really needed to make some doctors appointments.

We made the decision! We would haul out Acadia in Maine in September. We would live at my Dad’s camp, and we would work and take care of all the life stuff we had been putting off for three years.

This winter has been a joy. We’ve spent so much time with family, enjoyed the beauty of the snow, worked our tails off at our “real” jobs while taking a bit of a break from our Abroad Reach Travel job. I am so glad we’ve had this opportunity.

Acadia’s Refit

In addition to all the reasons we needed to stop, Acadia also needs some work. In addition to desperately needing fresh bottom paint and standing rigging, we had some fun projects in the works too! Just to name a few: converting the pilot berth to a cabinet unit, refitting the fridge/freezer, setting up the vberth to lift on struts, new saloon and cockpit cushions, and installing an new autopilot.

In true Andy and Gwen fashion, we probably bit off more than we could chew. We were excited about the planned upgrades and getting back on the water. We’ve been picking away at projects all winter long!

A Screaming Deal of a Van

We have been tossing around the idea of buying/building another campervan basically from the day we sold Lavender, our first van, in October 2022. We started getting more serious in December because our winter housing would be the perfect place to build a new van. Cue the facebook marketplace search.

Andy found a Ram Promaster high top with 140,000 miles listed for only $8,000. Only trouble was, it ran but didn’t drive. The transmission was toast. After some research on how much a replacement would cost, we drove to see this beauty of a van. We decided to take the risk and buy it. We kept our fingers crossed that the transmission wasn’t fully blown up and just needed a new pump.

No such luck. But Andy successfully swapped the transmission out and a rebuilt transmission in mid march and we were getting geared up to start our build!

The News No One Wants

It took 8 months of doctors telling me my issues were diet or hemorrhoids before a doctor finally agreed to send me to a GI doctor. On March 21st, I had a colonscopy and the news was not good. They found four polyps, three of which were on the “large” side. Four days later the doctor informed me that one of the polyps was cancer.

At 36 years old, otherwise healthy person, with no family history of colorectal cancer I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. I am incredibly lucky that it was caught early and over the last few weeks there has been mostly good news. As good as news gets when it comes to a cancer diagnosis short of “you’re cured!”. I am still waiting on a few more scans and appointments but it is looking as though I will not need any additional treatment or surgery. But I am in for a pretty intense monitoring schedule for the next few years. We are expecting colonoscopies every 6-12 months for the forseeable future, CT Scans every 6 months and lots and lots of blood work.

Once we learned that I would probably need to be in Maine at a minimum every 3 months for the foreseeable future, we started trying to figure out what that meant for our plan to re-start cruising in June.

What Do We Do Now

Maine is notoriously hard to get to. We even have a saying here “you just can’t get there from here”. Heading to the Bahamas was almost immediately ruled out because we couldn’t afford to fly me home from there. That left the following options:

1. Give up cruising and go back to land life.
2. Keep cruising, staying in the US, and flying home leaving Andy and Aiden with the boat every few months.
3. Launch the boat for the summer in Maine, haul out in the fall and repeat the winter we’ve just had.
4. Launch the boat for the summer in Maine, and take our new van for some adventures starting in September.
5. Ask the boat yard to store Acadia until Spring 2025, work on her refit this summer, and then head out with the van for the winter when I finish working at the end of July.

We ruled out the first three options pretty quickly. I hated the idea of potentially receiving bad news without Andy and we are both really antsy to get traveling again.

We were originally thinking we would go with option four but when we started looking at how much we needed to do on Acadia to launch her, plus getting the van ready for full-time van life, while working, we were both super overwhelmed!

So drum roll………….We are going with option five!!

The New Plan

The new plan looks something like this:

April/May 2024–We work on the van build during every lunch break, evening, and weekend. We are going to be sharing the build with all of you on all our socials and youtube!

June/July 2024–We live and work in the van, in Maine, while working on Acadia projects so that when we are ready to launch and potentially go cruising in May 2025. If you hang out with us for the boat projects, don’t go anywhere there will be boat projects coming soon!

August 2024-We are planning to head to Canada for a somewhat close to home shake down for the van before we head further afield.

September-April 2024–We travel in the US and Canada in the van, bouncing back to New England for appointments and tests when necessary.

May 2024–We launch Acadia for a summer in Maine and maybe Nova Scotia.

August 2024–We reasses and decide if we head south in Acadia or haul out and adventure in the van.

Even though this is technically a back-up plan ,we are super excited about it. We have loved traveling up and down the east coast the last three years and honestly can’t wait to do it again but we are thrilled that this is giving us the opportunity to see new places in the US and Canada! We’ve started making lists of destinations but we would love to hear where you think we should spend our time this year! Leave us a comment below!

What’s Next for Abroad Reach Travel?

This also feels like a great time to chat about ART and what are our plans here! I took a step back from creating about 16 months ago. I was in a really bad headspace and decided to take a month or two break. A few months turned into more than a year but I’m ready to be back!

Youtube

We’ve been filming again! Both for boat projects and the van build. Getting back to our roots of DIY projects has been awesome and I’m super excited to share with you all! I’m currently struggling with how to “relaunch” so I may just end up acting like I never left. 😂

The Blog

I have been finding writting really cathartic through all of the stress the last month. When we did the first van build, I wrote technical articles about how to do and materials to buy. I’ll be updated these as we go through this build but I’m also going to be starting a more narrative series for this build. I’m aiming for at least weekly diary style updates, this being the first in that series.

Patreon

We decided to dismantle our Patreon a few months ago. Honestly, I was never super keen on the idea to begin with especially since we’ve never been particularly good about posting on a schedule. We’ve instead decided to set up a “send us a tip” system in our store. If you find a video or instagram story particularly helpful consider sending us a couple dollars. It helps keep us making videos!

The Abroad Reach Travel Store

Speaking of our store! Last fall we set up an online store here on the website. We started selling the ICW workbook that I made myself a few years ago and a few of our favorite merch items. But we have big plans for our store!

I have been working on a packaging some of my cruising spreadsheets and checklists to add as digital products. Andy has been putting his genius engineer brain to work and has been hard at work solving for some headaches we’ve had as cruisers! We are sending a prototype of our first boat gear product, a galley/head port hatch exhaust fan, to beta testers in the next few weeks!

We are really excited about what the future holds and can’t want to share our adventures with all of you!