Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

We find, while preparing for our voyage in Hampton, Virginia, a number of folks planning voyages of their own and a few who have actually left the dock. The planners are dreamers, conjuring obstacles to maintain the dream. As soon as the boat is all ready; boats are boats, and will never be all ready. As soon as they have accumulated enough money; there will never be enough. As soon as the kids are older, or the kids have moved out, or …

I recall a man I worked with years earlier who refused a sizeable Christmas bonus. “I always wanted a Cadillac,” he said, “but as soon as I get my Cadillac, the dream is gone. I just think the car can’t be as good as the dream.”

People know when they leave the dock, the dream is gone.

My marketing plan for my book is to speak to as many groups and individuals as possible about our family’s journey. My wife and I have been busy scheduling as many groups as we can to present our story to. Last week, we scheduled upcoming talks at seven different Rotary International Chapters in Michigan.
This [...]

We’re new to this life, and we share apprehension and even fear of the worlds we will come into contact with over the course of our voyage, much of it bred in our American perspective that the world is a scary place.

This becomes a recurring theme: places are special because of the people there. We’re meeting many people in different places, but are yet to find one of the places where they don’t value human life like we do.

Public space, dwindling as it is and socialist by definition is a true asset of America.

Many people around us hold keys to valuable insights, and the only path to those keys is to minimize my arrogance and hope they can overcome their fear of condescending.

This is the first of a six part series, to be uploaded daily. -Gregg
We steer for the entrance to the Red Sea, trying to make sense of the information in the cruising guides about the anchorages and safety in this area. Cruising guides encourage boats to use the main shipping channel of Bab el [...]

A good friend of mine, fearing I’d slipped a bit too far from my conservative West Michigan roots during the course of our time in other countries, emailed me a link to a transcript from yesterday’s Rush Limbaugh gospel service. Rush addressed a quote by John Adams: “We have no government armed with the power [...]

Memories of Indonesia:
As Americans, we live in invisible test tubes of about an arm’s length called our space and we feel uncomfortable when someone violates it. In Indonesia, and in all of the non-western cultures that we visit, personal space does not exist, and we learn not to miss such space.
We use, wherever possible, local [...]

We all know that the minute a new car leaves the lot with a new owner, the amount of money that car trades for takes a noticeable hit. It is the same piece of machinery it was only moments before, nothing has changed in the value of that car, in the physical components that cause [...]