Turn-Around Point

Key West, Florida

For those of you who may not have figured it out yet, we are in Key West - basically as far south as you can drive in the Continental USA.
Here is the proof.

Notice, if you will, that Susanne is holding on to our pet SPOT. This is a personal satellite tracker - sort of a combination of a GPS and a one-way Sat-data-phone - a Christmas present from Sue`s brother.
Periodically we press the OK button on SPOT and he responds by taking a GPS position and sending an email, via another satellite, to a select list of recipients, detailing our exact lat-long position, complete with a link to Google maps. At this point it is really just a test as we are still able to send and receive normal emails and even update this blog pretty much any time we wish. But someday, when we are presumably at sea, this will no longer be possible and SPOT will be our only way to let people know we are still alive.

Meanwhile, this landmark also marks our personal evaluation point. I think this trip has now established some basic facts about ourselves:

- We do not do well sitting in one place for any length of time.
- We do not seem to be capable of planning ahead for more than a week at a time.
- We really miss Sine Timore and are more and more concerned about her well-being.
- We are absolutely incapable of sticking to a budget, no matter how liberal we think it is.

In addition, the fates are ganging up on us. Wherever we go, we find nice weather and then our presence seems to turn it to crap. Right now, our beautiful tropical island is threatening to turn into a cold, rainy bog, possibly going down as low as 20C tonight. And it would have been a perfect day for watching the scheduled yacht race. As it was, we still watched for a while, before being forced to seek shelter (and Key Lime pie of course).
Our dollar is on a downward slide making it more and more expensive to continue to travel in the US, and really, we cannot go any further in this direction anyway.
We have a commitment to be back in Edmonton for various appointments at the start of March and we would really like to check on the boat before then. Ideally we would have liked to stick around in Florida until the boat show in Ft. Lauderdale in mid-February, but it just would not give us a good enough driving window for making it all the way back to Canada afterwards.
All of these factors have combined to make this our turn-around point.

So, tomorrow, the 1st of February, we will turn our car around and start back into the frigid north. Just how long could that take us? Well, while SPOT was busy sending our position home at the above-pictured buoy, we also asked Heidi (our trusty Garmin navigation system) to plot us a course home. According to her (and she is rarely wrong about these things) we are exactly 6413 kms from our beloved Sine Timore, using the quickest possible route. Of course this would take us through the heart of a winter-bound continent, so our actual route is bound to be a little longer, as we attempt to avoid the bad weather until we arrive in Nanaimo, where we have no choice in the matter.
In all likelihood, we will be following a very similar route to that which brought us here. Hopefully we can drop in on a few places that we skipped by on the way down but generally it should be a much quicker trip this time.

Stay tuned for what promises to be the gumball rally for 2010.