A Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step….
To be completely honest, I never dreamed I would have the means or the courage to fulfill
this dream, even while I kept dreaming about it. Not until I met my beloved husband Dave.
Dave and I met in San Diego at a seminar in 2002. The seminar was given at a local marina
facility, even though it had nothing at all to do with boats. Instantly attracted to each
other, we spent every spare moment together during breaks, walking up and down along the
docks and talking with each other. One of the first questions he asked me, was whether or
not I liked boats. My heart skipped a beat, and I knew I had found the man for me. We
began seeing each other soon after the seminar, and I introduced Dave to backpacking in
the Sierras and camping out in the desert. He loved it as much as I did, and what’s
more, he wrote me poems, meditated, and showed me his beautiful, deeply spiritual
attitude towards life.
The next summer Dave moved down to Murrieta where I was practicing
acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and moved into my house on Iron Gate Lane. Life was
blissful and wonderful for quite some time, until our world was shaken up drastically
with some very difficult events.
In 2004 we were backpacking at Jordan Hotsprings when I
suddenly had a very strong feeling we needed to pack up and hike out. We did soon
afterwards, and when we made it to the car my cell phone was full up with messages from
my friend Theresa, asking me to call her. As it turned out, my father had had a
motorcycle accident on his way home, and had broken his neck. I took the next flight back
to Tenerife, and immediately went to the hospital. My poor mother was badly shaken, as
she had seen my Dad’s motorcycle lying on the road on her way home in her car, and
of course, my brother’s death immediately came flooding back to her with all the
fears regarding my father’s wellbeing. Tenerife’s hospitals are not the most
renouned in the world to say the least, and so my poor father had to endure three weeks
lying on his back with his neck in a collar (which caused him horrible pain) while the
jack hammers were going all day outside the window during construction of expansion of
the hospital. He was terrified of becoming quadriplegic, as his first two vertebrae were
shattered and part of one bone was almost touching his spinal cord. It was a very trying time,
and I sometimes marvel that he was able to pick himself up again from this ordeal and
find more sailing adventures to go on! After four long months in a halo-vest (a horrible
contraption that stabilizes the neck, with four screws sticking into the skull), he was
recovered enough to start a long rehabilitation process, and had to endure a lot of
physical pain. My brother was the guardian angel who made sure he would not end up
completely paralyzed.
Shortly upon my return to California, Dave became deathly ill after
a spider bit his ear and spent ten days in Intensive Care hemorrhaging severely. An
emergency surgery ended up saving his life. It was at the end of this very rocky year that Dave proposed
to me. He took me on our favorite hike, and out of the blue pulled out a ring and asked
me to become his wife. After all we had been through together, we both realized that there is nothing more precious than
the gift of love. So I accepted, and we married on March 21st 2006 at the small
church in Tenerife I used to attend as a child, and had a perfect day! My parents hosted
the most lovely dinner at my brother’s childhood friend’s restaurant
(“Chez Lucas”), with mostly my family, some close friends, and Dave’s
son Dylan & his girlfriend, Kirstee.
The dream to go sailing to distant lands started to become more
and more a topic of conversation. Just how to finance it?? We were thinking about moving back to Europe, and
thought that in the interim, after me giving up my practice, we could take some time off
and have an adventure. The idea hit me that we could sell the house, which at the time had
doubled its value due to the real estate boom in California. So, against all my taurean
instincts, we put the house on the market and endured the many open houses and the constant
cleaning and spiffying up it takes to sell a house. After almost a year we were successful –
thank God, because shortly afterwards the real estate market started going south! With
some money in the bank from the house sale and a loving contribution from my parents for our wedding, we were finally ready to look for a boat!
