We’ve been limited in our freedom of movement for some time, when the boys were younger it was the family court judge who put the strongest restrictions on us.

These days it’s my work. I work for a university in the US so it’s important that we have our two primary locations and then move between them in a more HR familiar “Snowbird” pattern. Everyone knows many folks who summer up north and then winter down south. It’s something HR departments have worked with before.

So we have our regular pattern and our regular stops. It helps that we know where everything is, the extended times apart help keep everything new to us and it’s also good to see friendly faces.

Today we are in Oriental NC. Oriental is a great little town and one of the things I particularly like happens to be “The Bean” which is a cute café directly across the street from one of the free docks.

When leaving The Bean today the lady from behind the counter told the boys that they need to stop growing. So I stopped and shared their plans, Ryan to work on the cruise ship, and Liam working on private yachts. And that’s when she said she feels like she’s been watching them grow up.

And that my friends is why I really enjoy returning to the same stops over and over again. I wonder how many other folks who work behind different cafe counters also feel that way. We get noticed in a bunch of cities.

Portland Maine, Provincetown Mass, Boston, Newport RI, Atlantic Highlands NJ, Oriental NC, Carolina Beach NC, and St. Augustine FL are the ones where we linger the longest and where the local baristas tend to remember our orders even if we’ve been gone for 6 months or more. The places where they make other customers wait so they can catch up on our adventures.

After the boys move off the boat, and again after I retire I hope to widen the territory that I sail, perhaps start to winter in the Bahamas each year and perhaps sail off somewhere farther away but to be honest. Having a regular migration is pretty darn awesome in and of itself.