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Donating Life 3 - Recovery, Return and Retrospective
Donating Life 3 - Recovery, Return and Retrospective

Burger was finally discharged and he and Nancy, too, began a daily walking routine. We met each night for dinner and chatted about the recovery process. Both donor and recipient were doing amazingly well.

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Donating Life 2… A Saga
Donating Life 2… A Saga

Back in April, further testing had been done at Wake Forest Baptist (WFB) including a tissue match to determine that David and Burger were compatible. Colleen, our Transplant Coordinator and her staff, coordinated all this for us without a hitch. We already knew that the blood types matched and ultimately we learned that David and Burger were a good all-around donor-donee match, but what if they hadn’t been?

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A Gift of Life… You’ve Got Two… Share!
A Gift of Life… You’ve Got Two… Share!

It all began with last year’s holiday letter from a friend. There was so much going on with the holidays when we received it, we put off reading it for a couple of weeks. When we finally retrieved it, we were surprised to learn that a long-time cruising friend was on dialysis and needed a kidney.

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Our Books

Interested in ordering a copy? Just click the image and you’ll be directed to the purchase page.

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DIY Camping Box Thumbnail.png
DIY Camping Box
$4.99

We have a love for camping and our Kia Sorento makes the perfect camping platform for us. We started out carting all our kitchen and cooking gear in a couple of bins, but that was too disorganized for our liking. It always seemed that the utensil or pan that was needed was at the bottom of one of the bins, and once everything was unpacked, it would take forever getting everything to fit back in. The logical solution was to build a camping box. It’s now on its third iteration, and we love it.

We documented the steps taken to build the box in a video that you can view here. This book was meant to accompany it, and contains a lot more information than we could fit in the video. It includes not only all the steps in building the box, but a complete list of materials with sources, a cut guide, dimensions of all cuts, and a list of the tools you will need.

Las Vegas for Non-Gamblers
Las Vegas for Non-Gamblers
$5.99
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Guide to Anchors and Anchoring
$4.99

Why “Just a Little Further”?

It’s like the old saying … how do you eat an elephant? A little at a time. It’s the same philosophy with sailing, upfitting and traveling in a van or starting out on a big trek. For that matter, it’s the same with any big challenge in life that you set for yourself. Take things one little step at a time and you can accomplish most anything. We began living aboard and sailing with minimal previous experience. We never upfitted a van or lived the van life before. We certainly never hiked long distances. We read lots; we researched; we prepared. Nothing is like the real thing though. The first time for anything can be frightening, but exhilarating and satisfying at the same time. The more you do something, the more confident you become and the better you are at it.

We’ve found that if we concentrate on little challenges, we’re better able to handle the big ones when they arise. If we’d said from the beginning that our intent was to circumnavigate the world, go around the five Great Southern Capes, and cross mighty oceans, perhaps we would have reconsidered. But we don’t think like that. Instead, we’ve always agreed that we’d sail or, more recently, travel the road in a van or trek great trails, as long as it was fun. We set small goals and before we knew it, we’d sailed around the world or vanned it across the USA or walked a thousand plus miles on the Via Francigena from Rome to Canterbury, England. It’s easy … just a little further each day.

A Taste of Our Travels

For a taste of our travels, head to our Travelogue page for a more detailed look at the countries we've visited. Please note that while we are in the process of transitioning to our new website, you may be linked to our old Nine of Cups website. Come back here frequently to see the progress we've made.