We were able to purchase Cordelia outright as we already had the plan to sail-off and had sold the family home and all our possessions.
Steve's job enabled us to keep Cordelia at a reasonable berthing cost for the 11years we owned her prior to our adventure and also allowed us to live on board for most of this time. During this period we had annual holiday's on her and added many additional features (still ongoing!).
We purchased Cordelia in Nov 2007 with a view of sailing off in 2009. However, family obligations dictated otherwise. Our eldest 2 children got married and our youngest decided to go off travelling. He met someone and settled in Canada. All three of them now have children, giving us our 8 grand children.
In 2016 we decided that if we were going to go off we needed to set a date and stick to it. We agreed April 2019 would be a good date as we would both be in our mid-fifties and pensions would kick in if we wanted to use them.
It's always the way though, we gave ourselves nearly 3 years to prepare and left it all to the last 6 months. We had a list of things that we needed to purchase and a list of jobs that we needed to complete before we sailed off. Steve was due to finish work on 31st March 2019 and I was resigning from one job but keeping the other, albeit slightly less hours. On top of this my mum became seriously ill and passed away, which was a huge shock but helped me anchor our decision to live our dream even more. I never want to say 'I wish I had', I only want to say 'I'm glad I did'.
