Rollin’

I fully admit it: Three and a half years of living in suburban Detroit made me pretty soft.  Once upon a time I was a free spirit, traveling across continents and oceans at the drop of a hat, always ready for a call or an e-mail telling me of some great new adventure.  I sailed to deserted islands, hitchhiked from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Panama, and drove to the edge of Alaska in a car that never should have made it to the end of the street.  After years of vagabonding around the world, I relocated to Michigan to be close to my sister and young nephew, landing a cushy job that promised to pay me a salary that would fund my own round-the-world cruise in 2 to 3 years.  It seemed to be the perfect place to gather myself; I needed to repair my horrendous credit and an even worse driving record, and for some reason I thought I would try to gain that elusive “sense of responsibility” that my parents and well-wishing married friends constantly told me I was lacking.

I enjoyed it, at least for a while.  Most people don’t know how great the racing is on the Great Lakes – since Midwesterners only have a five or six month long season, they race and party their asses off between May and September.  During the summer I found myself racing 4 or 5 days a week, with great distance races every month or so breaking up any windward-leeward monotony.  Places like Put-in-Bay, Port Sanilac, Traverse City, and Alpena don’t enter into most serious sailors’ minds very often, but they take on deep meaning when you end races there – whether you enjoy them with your family or get so blindingly drunk and belligerent that the police actually escort your boat to the breakwater to ensure that you actually leave for at least a year.

I’ve long maintained that only those with a love for masochistic shit like ice fishing, iceboating, snowmobiling and cross-country skiing can survive Michigan winters without major travel time in warmer climates.  When the local economy decided to plummet like a cell-phone dropped overboard, I lost the ability to do that kind of traveling, and this winter I finally realized that I just couldn’t take another Northern winter.  Since my lovely fiancée had been ready to flee suburbia for some time, we decided to go out with a bang. We planned our wedding in 8 weeks and got married the last weekend in January; we told our friends, families, and employers that we didn’t know if or when we’d be back.

We did have some ideas, though.  I’ve dreamed of being a freelance writer for years, and Mer has a passion for taking pictures, and after a lot of brainstorming we decided to try to live out those dreams.  Lots of you already know the way I roll – I have never comprehended the concept of moderation in any form, and shades of grey don’t seem to be part of my composition.  This road trip isn’t going to be a half-ass thing either – already many of our friends and families have been scratching their heads in confusion.  “Why would you drive to Puerto Vallarta?,” “What about banditos?,” “What are you going to do for work?” have been muttered by more than a couple.  Fortunately, the Ed understood our vision and how cool the road trip would be, and after a couple of hours hanging out with him, his adorable kids, and sweet-as-can-be wife, the Clean/Sailing Anarchy Road Trip was born.    

We’re going to give you all some very fun stories – I promise you that.  I like to think that we’ll do it a little like Hunter Thompson would have if he had the technology available to him in his Gonzo days that we do today.  We are positively loaded down with gadgets -   I think the electronics that we’ve stuffed into our beater Isuzu Rodeo are worth two or three times the car.  We’re toting Mer’s awesome new digital SLR camera and the old point-and-click Canon digital, a sweet video camera that puts everything onto a mini DVD as soon as we shoot it, Mac and Dell laptops, a loaded GPS, and a Verizon broadband wireless card that can connect to the internet almost anywhere we go.  We’ve got a Blackberry and a cellphone and some serious entertainment too – a few dozen DVD’s, a brand new Sirius satellite radio and an 80 GB iPod.  We’re even bringing all the SA Podcasts with us.

Our trip has already started – we are actually about two weeks into it.  We’ve driven over 8,000 miles, and we’ve probably got 25,000 more in us. We started in Michigan in a blizzard, headed South to Charleston, SC to drop off some crap and meet some of the locals in what will probably become our new home town, and then drove across the country to San Diego to sail in the first Flying Tiger one-design race ever.  On Monday morning we will cross the border in Nogales, Arizona, and drive the 1200 + miles to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to sail with the only Australian team in the J/24 World Championship.  We’ll take some side trips on our way back up to the states, then work up the Pacific coast from Baja California to Vancouver, British Columbia.  We’ll blaze across to the East Coast for Charleston Race Week, and finally we’ll hop on a plane and go meet some of our antipodean bros in Australia and New Zealand. 

Our itinerary is wide open.  We are leaving our schedule open so that YOU can help determine our fate.  Scary, huh? Once again, the SA community gets to do something completely different – we want you to tell us about a good race coming up, about a great sailing club that nobody’s ever heard of, about a cool garage-built skiff that you want the world to see.  This is no big-budget event, so we’ll be relying on the kindness of SA’ers in order to find boats to sail on, towns to party in, and beds to get a few hours of sleep in or floors where we can throw sleeping bags down on.  If you have any ideas, or think you can help out a couple of starving wanna-be journalists, let us know your ideas HERE.  We’ll be writing it all down, and every few days we’ll put up another story, some pics, or a good video so that y’all can follow along.

We’ve also got our mascot, Kuma, who will be with us every step of the way.  He eats dog food and weighs around 150 pounds, and while he isn’t really a sailor, he can pull chicks better than any rock star.  If you can’t stand big dogs, you’ll want to stay away from us.  To everyone else, we look forward to meeting you.  This trip is going to be an incredible journey, and the coolest part is that we all get to do it together.

This week we’ll have some stories and pics from our trip so far, including a great weekend in San Diego racing on the Ed’s FT-10, Anarchy.  We also spoke to Brad Van Liew about the South Carolina Maritime Foundation’s new schooner in build, and we checked out the boat, which is gorgeous – we’ll tell you all about it this week as well.  Of course, there are bound to be some stories from the 1000 + miles that we’re driving in Mexico over the next three days – if you don’t hear from us, please call the embassy. 

-Mr. Clean, with photos from Mrs. Clean
19 February, 2007