We took our time getting to nowhere in particular in the summer and fall of 1979. We had not been married a year. At twenty-four, I really had not been anywhere to speak of, so just crossing over the bridge into Illinois and leaving St. Louis for what might have been ever was exciting. After several days of driving and traveling southeast on highways that linked Paducah to Nashville and Rock City, we found ourselves at a dive site in northern Florida that we had read about called Ginnie Springs.

As part of our preparation to someday live on a boat, we had taken scuba diving classes in St. Louis. After several weeks of classes in a swimming pool, our open-water certification dive was scheduled at Norfork Lake in northern Arkansas. There, visibility was arms-length at best. So when we entered the waters at Ginnie Springs, we felt as though we had reached the nirvana of diving. Even though it is known as “the world’s favorite freshwater dive” and described by Jacques Cousteau as “visibility forever,” most of it is located in and around caves, where it is pitch black. And silent. Without a flashlight, a diver’s tank bubbles could not be seen as going up or down. Disorientation, and the slow anguishing last-few-minutes of life, is the death sentence awaiting most of the doomed. We, armed only with our recently acquired open-water certifications–the training wheels of scuba diving–unknowingly ventured to a place marked with signs like, “Divers have died here!” Ignorance is bliss, indeed. Thirty years or so later, Ginnie Springs and everything associated with it makes for a divers paradise, and we knew it when it was nothing. As it would turn out, many opportunities like that have crossed our paths, some of which we’ve grabbed onto and some that we’ve let slip away. Hindsight is 20/20.

It took days to make our way down the peninsula of Florida. We had no jobs and therefore, no schedules. We detoured west, towards Tampa, and camped and dove in a place called Dunedin, and then backtracked to Orlando and did Disney World for a few days. Epcot had just opened. Having never been out of St. Louis–my mother’s pilgrimages to Our Lady of the Snows and my church’s youth group’s soirees in Tan-Tar-A at the Lake of the Ozarks not withstanding–our weeks of traveling to new places were exciting, eye-opening, and thrilling! I discovered that I loved the spontaneity and the uncertainty of life on the road.

By this time, I had known my husband approximately fourteen months. We were learning as much about each other as we were about all the places on our journey. In retrospect, the months we lived out of our VW camper set the foundation for what would be a normal lifestyle for us: we–even when ‘we’ included two kids and all their stuff/pets/etc.– functioned extremely well in tight spaces. That attribute would figure greatly in the years ahead.

Something we had in common was a penchant for scuba diving, and we fit it into the agenda whenever possible. Off of Key Largo is John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, which is another must-dive site in Florida and is on many bucket lists. Which is understandable, given the eight-and-a-half-foot statue of Jesus Christ, arms extended upwards, that sits in twenty-five feet of crystal clear water, with coral reefs that are decades old abounding everywhere, as are the schools of fish–protected in the state park–swimming about, unconcerned. Like when I dove Ginnie Springs, I remember that a big part of the diving experience at Pennekamp was the complete and utter silence. At times, it could be deafening.

We looked for boats as best one could, given that we were traveling most of the time. Sometimes we bought local newspapers and perused the classifieds; sometimes, we would stop at marinas and browse. Up until then, our only hands-on exposure to boats was his parents’ ski boat at the Lake of the Ozarks and a weekend basic sailing class we had taken on Carlyle Lake in Illinois. Nevertheless, by the end of 1979, we were the proud–albeit green–owners of a sailboat whose history included being seized in a drug bust and that we bought “as is,” from the assistant state’s attorney down in Key West. Cheap. Cash. Stripped.

This was a most interesting time to be living in the Keys.