Mid-Life Cruising!!!: 2016 .. A Review!

Another year has whizzed by, and as I've done in the past .. I'm looking back at 2016 and summing it up. This is my SIXTH year in review .. this has gotta be the year we leave right? Bahamas or Bust in 2017! The picture above shows Nirvana after the completed projects the second half of 2016 .. we're getting excited!

After downsizing a second time the end of 2015, finishing up more work on Nirvana in the boatyard, and dealing with winter, we started 2016 off with a quick trip to Miami. Ken & I had never stayed in Miami before, and we really enjoyed exploring .. and dreaming of bringing Nirvana! We took both a day boat tour (that's our cool guide in the pic below) and a night boat tour of Miami, seeing the port and all sorts of celebrity homes .. really fun!

On March 10th, we FINALLY got Nirvana outta the boatyard after over a year! This was a big day for us .. and a huge weight off of our shoulders to be back in the water. The picture below shows Nirvana back in the water at the boatyard .. and ready to get to her new "home". She didn't sink!

One of the first projects after getting Nirvana out of the yard was painting her new non-skid, which meant lots of taping first!

By the end of May/beginning of June, the non-skid was finished .. and Nirvana was looking good!

It was the end of June, and we were ready for another quick getaway! This time, we spent a weekend in Pensacola, FL and since Pensacola is only about 3 hours away, we were able to drive. The forecast was rainy, but it turned out beautiful .. just what we needed! While there, we checked out the (free) National Aviation Museum, which was very impressive and we'd definitely recommend it!

By the end of August, we had the bow sprit, stern pushpit, and stanchions back on Nirvana. Re-bedding all of this stuff was time consuming .. isn't everything on a boat?!

During the summer, we also took a navigation course given by the Lake Pontchartrain Sail & Power Squadron. We met every Tuesday night at the Madisonville Maritime Museum, for a minimum of 3 hours each time. The course lasted about eight weeks (my memory is terrible) and we both passed the exam. Again I forget, but we both had a score in the 90's .. Ken beat me by a couple of points. This class was very thorough and we learned a lot .. we'd highly recommend it!

After all of this, we needed a real vacation .. meaning Mexico! We arrived on Isla Mujeres the second week of September, and this tiny island lifestyle was so much fun. We rode around on a scooter and had a blast! We hated to leave ...

but we had reservations for a few nights in Cancun!

We LOVE Mexico, and it really makes us antsy to move onto Nirvana and start exploring new places! We arrived back home and started tackling more boat projects, including fixing our hard-to-move sliding hatch and making it slick! We also added "Plasteak" handrails and installed new, custom Ipe companionway trim, among several other projects.

In October, we had some fun nearby by visiting the Madisonville Wooden Boat Festival with our daughter & son-in-law and doing some hiking at the Clark Creek Nature Center in Natchez, MS.

In August, Ken turned 50 .. and in November I turned 50! I shared a post I had written a few years earlier about what I thought I'd have accomplished by fifty .. let's just say I need to get busy!

Just before Thanksgiving, Ken removed a bunch of rotten wood from Nirvana's interior and replaced it with new, fresh wood .. including a new bulkhead in the salon!

The interior is looking sooo much better! I spent 3 days cleaning & sanding all of the interior teak, and Ken brushed it with two coats of Spar polyurethane in a satin finish. I haven't written a post about this yet, but I can't wait to show you how much better the stained and worn teak looks inside!

December was spent celebrating Christmas on the bayou with friends & Santa ...

and with family at their homes!

Santa was really good to us, with lots of good Christmas gifts to ourselves!

We rang in the New Year with a trip to Austin, Texas with our daughter and son-in-law. None of us had ever been to Austin, and we loved it! We visited Mt. Bonnell ... (Ken being silly)