Concluding Remarks
We have spent 29 days living aboard a 25′ O-Day Sailboat cruising from Oneida Lake to Lake Champlain and back via the Erie and Champlain Canals. We meet tons of people, made many memories and explored many communities from a very unique prospective.
Now that we are back to being land dwellers, we have slowly been getting back into the real world mode of using a clock and having others relying on us, and us relying on others. Everyday we see family and friends who just cannot fathom where we have been for the past month. Everyone is just in disbelief that we spent a month on a boat, much less travel well over 500 miles on a 25′ sailboat.
We are now hooked on cruising. I equate this to people as having all the benefits of camping in an RV while going to a new campsite every night, without the fuss of breaking down and setting up camp; also we have the option to be in complete solitude if desired. We loved exploring all the towns and history that lines the waterways. Even more so I think we enjoyed the people from all walks of life that we meet along the way. We meet locals as well as other cruisers from thousands of miles away.
We left the trip knowing that we would have to buy a new boat, one that was more accommodating to living aboard and power cruising. The sailboat was great, but it just was not an ideal boat for such a trip. Furthermore we now want to go west to see the Western Erie Canal, Finger Lakes, Oswego Canal and Lake Ontario where a motorboat would be ideal. Also we missed many things along the way during our trip, so we plan on repeating this trip again.
See the Rain or Shine Blog for details of our new boat and why we chose the boat we did. We looked for over a year and finally found a boat had a balance of everything we wanted combined with a reasonable price.
If you have any comments, questions or are planning a trip please feel free to contact me and I will be as helpful as I can. You can post your comment here on the blog, on the forum or email me at mail@nycanals.com.
Happy Boating,
Greg & Leila