We sold our farm one year ago. It wasn’t because we weren’t doing well—in fact, I couldn’t keep up with our hatching eggs waitlists. Kevin and I were burned out, and emotionally raw from the turn of events over the past several months leading up to our decision.
It was time for a change.
You see, the unexpected loss of Kevin’s brother, shortly proceeded by his father’s death after a year-long battle with cancer, and a horrific accident that nearly claimed both my parents changed our outlook on life. The motions of farm life—feed, water, shovel shit, repeat—had become a burden rather than a joy. I had also started my first job off the farm in years.
Office life didn’t suit my free spirit. There was an asshole who sat one desk over all day. He made life hell. I went to my manager and HR, but he used his mental health to justify his treatment of others. I used to bring chicks to my desk where, I had a heat lamp in a drawer, until customers would meeting me in the parking lot on my lunch break. Everyone loved them! He decided after months of doing this, that he was allergic to them. It was a MAJOR blow to my personal business, which I wasn’t willing to give up. That was never in my plan. It was obvious to everyone what he was doing.
I quit my job as a graphic designer
I felt like I wasn’t valued by the company, and gave them a full month before I moved. No one liked him. In fact, after I’d moved, they moved his desk into a cubical. He got worse, so they finally terminated his position, being careful not to give him a reason to pull out the disability card and sue them.
We moved onto a huge sailboat.
Kevin had always wanted to live on a boat, so we did. We moved onto a 44-foot catamaran and sailed the along the eastern US coast for a while, slowly making our way from Hampton, VA to Long Island, NY. It was an amazing fun-filled time—until it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong here; I wouldn’t change a damn thing. We nearly died at sea in the worst storm Kevin and I had seen in our lives—which is a lot given our combined time on the earth of 98 years.
We struggled to find what home meant to us when we moved back to Maine.
After that, we moved back to Maine and struggled to find a sense of home for months. We bounced around like weird middle-aged nomads between family members, and nearly bought a house from my parents. Eventually we ended up moving to a remote 223-acre wooded property in Bradford with a primitive hunting cabin a mille off the main road, accessible only by snowmobile or a four-wheeler with tire chains. We struggled through the winter, cutting fallen trees and even living one that were in the trail or blocking the way to other firewood.
I washed clothes by hand. I did a lot of reading. We hauled water from a nearby stream and heated it on the wood stove in a big pot for bathing. It was hard, but worth it. As spring came things because a little easier—aside from being very, very muddy getting in. The camp had belonged to Kevin’s brother who’d passed and we are in the process of purchasing it now.
We moved onto an RV and drove from Maine to Alaska which is 1/6th of the circumference of the Earth.
After the boat was finally repaired from our rough voyage, it still took months to sell. When it did, we bought an RV, less than half the size of our boat—but comparable to the one-room cabin we’d just spent months in. And, it has indoor plumbing! A major bonus after the outhouse went from freezing to your ass on contact to filling with bugs back at base camp.
We drove from Maine to Alaska, winding through Canada and the US to get here. We brought our youngest son, Danny, and yesterday his father flew in from Maine to accompany him back home. But first, they are staying with our RV for a week while we fly to Hawaii to spend some time with an old friend of mine. I haven’t seen her in 15-years.
We leave for Hawaii tomorrow.
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