I’m not really sure what I expected from marina life, except that…I didn’t think it’d feel this primitive! Can you relate to our experience?

It’s a half mile walk from the car to the boat, which is a nice walk, but it feels like we’re hiking in because we normally have backpacks toting some gear. We haven’t really gone through our water system, we don’t know if the tanks are clean or if the filters are old, so we’ve been hauling potable water in jugs from the marina office / shower house. We’re trying to avoid adding humidity to the boat, so we take all our showers up at the marina shower house. We have a gas stove onboard, which works great! but it’s a bit different from the electric stove we had at the house.

That’s right, all we’re missing is a tent – it feels just like camping!

In our previous neighborhood, the neighbors weren’t particularly friendly (not unfriendly either, just kept to themselves), so it’s weird to be enthusiastically greeted by everyone we see. In our old neighborhood, we stopped to pet a local cat and a cop pulled up behind us and waited to make sure we didn’t steal it. At the marina, our neighbor says “If our cat climbs on your boat, will you please try to shoo him back in our direction?”

The abundance of fresh air is so nice! And the sunsets…there’s no sunset like a sunset on the water. At the house we couldn’t see the sunset at all, just the occasional red glow to let us know we were missing something beautiful. At night we could only see a handful of stars through the light pollution. Things are certainly different now.

The biggest adjustment to marina life is our 11-hour days, due to the new, longer commute to work. My old commute was 10 minutes, and I went home for lunch every day. Now it takes an hour each way and I have to stay at work during my lunch hour. So I’ve lost virtually 3 hours of my day, and I’m struggling to make that up right now. I console myself with the reminder that a year from now, I won’t have a job or a commute.