Retroperspective
A little history / Background
2011-11-15 - Christian
Since June we are now preparing our adventure.
I asked in Dezember 2010 for an Sabbatical and I got support of my boss.
Dagmar quited her job in the hospital and her second job in a cute giftshop (Ideenreich in Bad Homburg).
The idea to travel to New Zealand by boat begun to became more concreat maybe a year or two before. It was an long development and the basis for that was our last visit to New Zealand in 2009 (www.sahr.de/g41/index.html).
We have taken our house to the market and we had an enormous echo. The house was sold within a month (it still hurts a bit!).
We began the boatsearch in 2010 and nearly bought a boat in autum, but it seemed not to be perfect (now I think a boat will never be perfect …).
Very intense we looked for a boat while selling the house (it would have been much easier if we have bought it in 2010, and we would be now in the canaries instead working to leave Seville …). We travelled to La Rochelle by train with about 80 kg of luggage because we intended to buy a boat on the spot and then depart to Porto, Portugal to have the crossing of the biscay done before the ugly weather is expected. We learned that it is a nightmare to change the trains in Paris, because they don´t have lifts or escalators but an enormous amount of steps which nearly killed us.
The boats in La Rochelle appeared not to be the best value-price-solution, so we decided to look at a boat in Bayonne and one in Seville => We traveld nearly through whole Europe just to buy a boat (we found out now that this happens quite often with "special boats"). Both were suitable and after judging the pro and cons of each boat we gave an offer and we bought the boat in Seville.
In the next two weeks we tried to check, measure and buy everything of the missing and adding gear and we meet Ben, who is our great support and we would have had big problems without him ...
Then we returned to Germany to sell, give away or to move everything of our household, including our cat Otto, whom we miss an aweful lot.
That time was total stress (after a very stressful time selling the house and buying a boat ...); Since June we have had 10 days of holidays and no weekends =>only work!
I think we will get the feeling of "holidays" the first time, when we are about a week of the canaries on the atlantic crossing, until then we have tons of work to do.
I am realy glad that we managed to do a goodbye party with our friends:

We work very hard to get our dream become true, at night we are so tired that we go to bed before midnight and we are awake before 8, which means about 2 hours more sleep than in normal workingconditions, but anything else is not possible...




Dagmar und Christian Sahr www.taitonga.de