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| GRENADA & IT'S PERFECT AWAITS |
The luxuries of living in America are common place to all that call this land home. Grocery stores open all hours of the day & night, full of anything you could want. A coffee house, gas station, convenience store, movie theater or mall on almost every corner. The abundance of things available to the average citizen is astounding. We have grown up here, we expect it & take it for granted.
There are many things to be said for the civilized world as we all know it. Crowds, noise, traffic, pollution, stores where you can buy anything your heart desires, just to name a few. Also around every corner they are building shopping malls, new roads, industrial parks & housing developments. If you call America home, it is changing so fast you may not recognize it the next time you turn around.
If the wild of the countryside has been your home & you depend on other wild creatures for your existence you could be in trouble. America the beautiful is using up its resources of land, oil, water, gas & natural habitat so fast....... It leaves the wild creatures of this part of the world with very few places to call home. From the giant elk in the nations forests to the small lizards & box turtles of the desert, they are fighting for their existence. It is no wonder that you find coyotes & bobcats roaming the neighborhoods in search of food, we have built a new housing development on their property.
This sounds like we don't appreciate the beautiful & amazing land we call home. We most certainly do, probably more so because of where we have been in the past year. After traveling through the beautiful islands of the Caribbean & seeing how simply these people live, we have a much different view of our place in this world.
We have been in the United States for 5 weeks. This is the first time I have driven a car in almost 2 years. Just like riding a bicycle it comes right back to you, but I see the experience differently. Traffic lights, stop signs, intersections, freeways, trucks & cars nonstop everywhere you look. Where are all these people coming from & where are they going? Why are they not at work or in school?
I walk into a grocery or retail store & there are so many choices it is mind boggling. In the abundant land of America it is average, even normal.
Living the life of a cruiser limits our choices in every part of our lives. From the food we eat, the people we meet, what we do for fun & how we move from place to place our choices are fewer. Coming home for a visit makes us realize what we are missing. But we are missing totally different things in both of the places we call home.
We are ready to return to the day to day life aboard It's Perfect, ready to go home. Projects, hiking to the grocery, walking across the hill to the marina for pizza night, the sun setting over the blue water & the quiet of sitting in the cockpit watching a different world slide by. This life has its perils, storms, bad anchorages, annoying neighbors & lack of supplies. Being gone makes us appreciate the good & the bad, of our life on the water. Someday soon we will return to civilization as we know it in the states, but until then there is more out there to be seen.
