Sail Away Home: Flight Risk

Carlsbad, California and a few things it has going for it:

1. Beautiful beaches.
2. Lack of snow.
3. Legoland, which I wouldn't have appreciated seven years ago.
4. Karl Strauss Brewing Company. BEER. Windansea Hefeweizen.
5. The flower fields, which look really cool from the cockpit of a small airplane.
6. Carlsbad airport.
7. Flying into Carlsbad airport over the flower fields in a tiny cramped airplane with a cute flight instructor.

I married that flight instructor a couple years later. And now we have a seven-year-old.

The stewardess gig ended when the yacht went into dry dock for a major refit. I moved back to San Diego and landed a job on a different yacht headed for Mexico. I quit a few weeks later when the captain proved to be a total loony. I might have been young but I was smart enough to realize that going to Mexico with a lunatic at the helm was not conducive to survival.

So instead, I signed myself up for flying lessons. Actually, I had wanted to be a flight attendant* but all the airlines required applicants to be 21. I was 19 and too impatient to get a crappy job while waiting out the two years. I did a little poking around the internet and found that the age minimum for a private pilot's license was only 16. Well, sign me up! Flying the planes was a thousand times better than slinging Cokes in the back.

I took lessons out of Carlsbad airport. After I had about thirty hours I started flying with the cute instructor. He brought up the great idea of doing a few ground lessons at his house. Uh huh. Well played, hubby. Well played. We dated for a couple of years before marrying at my grandparents' house in an awesome backyard ceremony complete with tubs full of Corona and a BBQ dinner.

Hubby in action.

By then the flight instructor was an airline pilot. We were moving back and forth across the country and I couldn't find a flight school I was happy with. I ended up getting my instrument rating and was almost done with my commercial when I unofficially quit.** We wanted to have kids and the stay-at-home mom gig sounded like something I could totally handle.***

We finally settled in Colorado and things were good and domestic. We bought a house when I was a few months pregnant. Adopted a couple of retired racing greyhounds, one who has managed to defy the laws of average greyhound lifespan and is still with us today. We acquired furniture, mowed the lawn, assembled a baby crib. The majority of our family moved from California to Colorado to be closer to us and the baby.

And then it all combusted. The baby was born and he was great. And then he turned one and I turned crazy. I was antsy. I missed flying. I missed boats. I was envious of my husband when he closed the trunk on his suitcase and left for a four day trip. He'd be going places, even if it was only Fresno or Fargo. I missed the ocean. I had this incredible little human and I wanted to raise him in an incredible way. Give him a different life than most kids. Something unconventional. Suburbia felt like drowning, like a slow suffocation. We had to get out.

And so we gave it all up. We pissed everybody off. We sold all of our furniture and rented out the house. We took that sweet little baby and moved to Boston. We moved him to Boston onto a thirty-six foot powerboat that smelled of gas and mold and had rose colored countertops and a million baby hazards. We stayed on the boat year round, through blizzards and hurricanes, through muggy summers and freezing winds.

From two-story house to 36'.

Home-sweet-home.

We fell in love with Boston. I could strap the baby on my back and wander around the city for hours. I could take the subway anywhere I wanted. Considering that my baby screamed in his carseat like somebody was ripping his toenails out every time we went somewhere, this was a MAJOR bonus. I'd push him up and down the bumpy docks in his stroller every night until he fell asleep. We became members of the New England Aquarium, the Museum of Science and Boston Children's Museum. We went to baseball games. We took our boat out and spent the night at anchor. We made great friends.

We had a blast.