Only a few days left back here in Maryland before we return to Florida and begin our next adventure…. one that involves a certain salty piece of land that we absolutely fell in love with early on in our travels.
Yep, we’re moving to Key West to settle down for a few years until we decide to throw it all in the blender and mix it up again.
Why Key West? Why not? It’s absolutely fabulous there! We love the quirky people and the tight knit community. We love that every street is lined with palm trees and that chickens roam everywhere. We love that it’s the USA but doesn’t feel like the USA (like, not at all). We love that we’ll have amazing reefs to snorkel and still have (two!) well stocked Publix grocery stores to shop from. It’s the best of the best. Our Bee’s Knee’s. And if we really, really want to go someplace “more exotic”, the Bahamas and Cuba are still closer than the Florida mainland.
We’ve gotten some comments asking us why we didn’t cruise longer. We were gone for a total of six months, only two of which were spent in the Bahamas. Much shorter than our original plan to cruise for a year plus, and to cover more ground – water? – deeper into the Caribbean. Truth is, we sorta ruined ourselves by going to Key West first. The time we spent there over the holidays were completely amazing… and we ended up falling in love with it. The Bahamas were beautiful – the water was the best I’ve ever seen in all my travels; the hundreds of islands provided literally something for everyone; the people were kind and welcoming – but in the end, all we could do was compare it to Key West. It’s like finding the perfect dress but trying on a few more just to say you did, all the while knowing your heart was already set on that first one.
While we knew we wanted to return to the Keys, we didn’t know exactly when. Two factors worked together to make the decision for us: our cruising budget was running low and we knew the time was approaching where we needed to get jobs again, and Matt’s uncle surprised us by buying a house in Key West and needed someone to live in it. The stars can’t align much better than that, so we took the leap and committed. And we can’t be more excited for the next step. True, we didn’t sail around the world for several years, but we did have the guts to dream up something crazy and actually GO DO IT, and that alone is farther than most people get in their entire life. Boom.
So, that means that we’ve put Foxfire on the market. That’s the part that really makes us sad. We’ve put so much love and pride into making her our own, it’s strange to think that she won’t be ours anymore. Selling Foxy is so much harder than it ever was selling a house…. she made it possible for us to have an amazing adventure, possible for us to find ourselves in the process, and possible for us to start this new chapter in our lives, one that we have no doubt is going to be pretty f-ing fantastic. It’s been a great two years, Foxfire. Here’s hoping that we’re able to find you your next set of owners that will love you as much as we do.
