Selling Everything To Sail On

They sold the farm, let go of the stuff, and pushed off the dock lines with a shared promise: sail around the world together. From their boat in French Polynesia, award-winning author and lifelong sailor Alison Gieschen joins us with her husband Dan to tell the full story behind their liveaboard sailing life on their 43-foot sailboat, Equus, including what it takes to keep moving when the dream gets expensive, exhausting, and genuinely scary.

We dig into the turning points that make a circumnavigation real: how Alison’s horsewoman roots and an early “out of nowhere” sailing vision turned into skills, how they met during a sailboat race, and why they decided to sell everything and commit. Then we go straight into the hard part, including their worst storm experience in the Gulf Stream, the damage that forced a turnaround, and the PTSD that lingered long after the repairs. Alison also shares the moment a trusted mentor helped reframe the fear, and why that single conversation kept them out there for eight years and counting.

We also talk about the quieter day-to-day realities that rarely make the highlight reels: staying close to kids and grandkids from far away, how minimalism changes your priorities, and how life at sea can create the focus to write books across memoir, children’s literature, and adult fiction. We wrap with their current route plans across the South Pacific, favorite stops like the Azores, and a practical travel-planning lesson from our own Europe prep about booking early when thousands of travelers hit the same ports and airports.

Subscribe for more conversations about long-term travel and real-world ways to make it happen, and if you found value here, share the episode and leave a quick review so more travelers can find us.

Alison's Website: https://alisongieschen.com/

Also check out: https://sailmates.org/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sailingequus

Download full-color PDFs of my book at prices below Amazon paperbacks. Visit my store at https://shop.jimsantosbooks.com 

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"Wherever We May Roam: Finding Your Travel Style" - On Amazon

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Welcome And Travel Style Mindset

Jim 0:00

Sailing can be a wonderful pastime, but have you ever thought of making it your whole life? Welcome to Wherever We May Roam, the new phase of Travels with Jim and Rita. This podcast is about discovering your own travel style to explore the world. I'm Jim Santos, and along with my wife Rita, we've spent more than 16 years traveling. Sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for a few months, and sometimes a whole lot longer. And what we've learned is this: there's no right or wrong way to travel. Some people take extended getaways, some roam part-time, some work from the road, and some make travel a full-time lifestyle. This podcast is about helping you figure out what works for you and how to make it happen in the real world. So whether you're planning your next trip or thinking about something bigger, we're glad you're here. Let's get started.

Meet The Sailors In Tahiti

Jim 1:00

Welcome everybody, I'm Jim Santos, joined by my wife and travel companion Rita, and this is Wherever We May Roam. Today, Alison Gieschen is an award-winning author, lifelong sailor, and horsewoman whose life story is as epic as the novel she writes. A former schoolteacher and graduate of the University of North Carolina Charlotte, Alison spent 30 years running an internationally successful equestrian program on her family farm in New Jersey. After raising three children with her husband Dan, whom she met during a sailboat race, they sold everything they owned to pursue their shared dream of circumnavigating the globe aboard their 43-foot sailboat, the Equus. To date, Alison and Dan have traveled to 46 countries and recently crossed the Panama Canal, setting their course for the remote islands of French Polynesia. Her time at sea and her deep connection with both horses and people across cultures have inspired a powerful body of work banning children's literature, memoir, and adult fiction. Alison, Dan, thanks for joining us on Wherever We May Roam.

Alison 1:59

Thank you for having us.

Jim 2:00

Good to be here. Now understand here right now for you is Tahiti.

Alison 2:04

Yes, it is. We are in the Society Islands, which includes which islands, Dan?

Dan 2:08

Tahiti, Bora Bora, Rayatea. Right now we're on the island of Rayatea, which is northwest of Tahiti. About a day's sail.

Alison 2:17

Yeah, we could we could sail over to Bora Bora in a few hours.

Jim 2:19

That's a fairly remote area, too. Seems like sailboat's about the most efficient way of exploring it, isn't it?

Alison 2:25

Yeah, definitely.

Horses First Then A Sailing Vision

Jim 2:27

One of the things I don't understand, Alison, the horses and sailing, you don't really think of them as being together. Uh which came first for you, the the horses or the boats?

Alison 2:35

It was definitely the horses. I grew up on a 100-acre farm in upstate New York in the Catskill Mountain Range area. Other than the Hudson River, there was no other bodies of water. And I never saw sailing or experienced it in any way until I was about 11, 12 years old. But around eight or nine years old, I was walking barefoot out to pick beans for my mother from the garden. And there's one place on our property in upstate New York that strange things happened there. And I don't know whether it was like this portal or some something ethereal. But as I was walking to the garden, I had this vision of standing on the deck of a sailboat being powered by sails. And it was the coolest feeling in the world. And I thought, how cool would it be to sail around the world someday? And then that piqued my interest in sailing.

Jim 3:22

Had you read any stories about sailing up to that point or had any kind of uh other exposure to it now?

Alison 3:28

It totally came out of the blue. I have no idea where the where this thought or this you know waking dream came from.

Jim 3:34

So when did you actually get a chance to sail?

Alison 3:37

Well, my dad worked for IBM and one of his good buddies was transplanted down to our area, and he was a uh world champion sunfish sailor. He won second in the world championships. And he decided our family needed to experience sailing. So he took us on a family vacation. I think the first time I was about 12 years old, and we chartered a boat in the Virgin Islands, and we did that twice, and that is what fostered my love of sailing.

Jim 4:03

We've interviewed a couple people who travel that way. They'll like fly to the Mediterranean and then charter a boat. Sounds like an interesting way to travel, but you really have to know what you're doing.

Alison 4:11

Yes, you do, especially in the Mediterranean.

Jim 4:14

Yeah, and Dan, that should come pretty easy for you as a graduate of the United States Merchant Marine Academy. You must be know just about everything about boats.

Dan 4:21

Oh, everything about all all different sizes of boats. As far as sailing, I started early in life in sailing when I was nine, ten, I guess. My uh dad moved to Philadelphia and got a boat on the Chesapeake Bay, and we spent pretty much every weekend in the summer and uh two weeks on his time off sailing the Chesapeake Bay. And uh he even got me my own little small dinghy to sail, so I would go off on my own all the time.

Jim 4:46

Yeah, we lived on the Choptank River in Cambridge, Maryland for a while, and there are some places there where it's really easier to get to them by boat than by car.

Dan 4:55

Oh, yeah. The Chesapeake Bay is a great place to grow up sailing and learning how to sail.

Jim 4:59

Yeah, yeah, it's incredibly deep too. Uh even the Choptank River, I was surprised there are places there that are over a hundred feet deep.

Rita 5:05

Right. Wow.

Dan 5:06

Well, up where I was, it was it was lucky if we got 15 feet. Oh we're we're familiar with it. We've we've gone by it a couple of times since we moved aboard, but uh it was it was kind of uh strange for me because like I said, the uh it's really fairly shallow in the upper Chesapeake Bay, and the only deep part is where the channel is. Right.

Jim 5:25

Well, Al Allison, at some point you must have learned a lot about sailing. Uh where did you actually start taking it seriously?

Alison 5:31

I guess when I started crewing from my mother, as often as I could, I traveled from UNCC to Newburn where they lived. It was a four-hour drive, but it was so worth it. And I wouldn't sail with her like on long weekends and whenever I could make it down there. So she basically, well, actually, I have to backtrack a little bit. When I was 17, I got a job as a camp counselor in the North Carolina 4-H camping systems. And one of the classes I taught was sunfish sailing. So I had to go get a Red Cross certification in sunfish sailing. So I was actually pretty good at the sunfish thing and teaching it, and that's where I kind of learned the the rudimentary aspects of you know, wind direction and sail trim and all that kind of thing.

Rita 6:15

We used to watch uh the the sunfish school in Ecuador when we lived in Salinas, Ecuador.

Jim 6:22

Yeah, we lived in Salinas on the Pacific coast there.

Rita 6:25

And uh that's cool.

Jim 6:27

You'd see them yeah, you'd see them pulling out a string of these little wavy boats.

Rita 6:31

It was hilarious.

Jim 6:32

Then they'd be sailing around for a while, then they'd all hook up again and they pull them back to the room.

Rita 6:35

Yeah, and they were really they were really young. The kids that were out there were really young.

Dan 6:41

In our travels, we've seen that a lot of time, but then these in the little optimist class. And yeah, you'd you'd see these guys and half of them couldn't sail and they had to go get rescued and show them back in the back.

Rita 6:51

Yes, yes. That was a lot of fun to watch.

Jim 6:54

Now

The Race Where They Met

Jim 6:55

I understand you first met in a sailboat race, so I've got to ask who won?

Dan 7:02

Hang on, hang on. At that Merchant Marine Academy, I was on a sailing team and we actually won two national championships. And then after I graduated, I I won another.

Alison 7:13

I like all this precursor to you losing. Does it make it an easier pill to swallow, honey?

Dan 7:19

So I'm I'm fairly good. I'm fairly decent at uh at racing. I uh went to work with her cousin, and he decided that we needed to take a trip, a road trip, down to North Carolina. And that's where his dad and Alison's dad had a little shop together, and they lived right next to each other. So he invited me to go down and sail with Alison's mother in this race called the Ore Race. And I said, Yeah, why not? Let's go. Let's let's let's go do some damage. And little do we know that Allison had decided to also go that same weekend.

Alison 7:56

And my sister.

Dan 7:57

And yeah, Alison and her sister decided to go. And their boat was only a 30-foot boat. Yes. And they really couldn't handle more than a couple people. So Alison and her sister got to go with her mom and dad on this boat. But since we made the trip all the way down there, they set me up on another boat to race, which happened to be a homemade boat from one of their cement boat.

Rita 8:20

Oh wow.

Dan 8:22

So it was rigged.

Rita 8:24

Sounds like very much so.

Dan 8:27

We came in dead last.

Alison 8:30

We won. We won.

Dan 8:33

But the owner told me that that was the best that he's ever done that race. So I'm I was kind of with that. But he was at the Don long before I was.

Alison 8:42

So it was a moral victory. Because the funny part of this story is that my cousin told me about this guy that's coming down, and I heard he was a national, three-time dinghy national champion. He was a preacher's kid, he's a marine engineer, King's Point graduate. And my sister had her husband recently left her, and she was with her two children, and I she moved in with me, and I was helping her along in life. And we had this four-hour drive to go where we knew we were meeting this eligible bachelor, and we fought the entire car ride over who was gonna get him. She's like, Well, I need him. I'm like, he's too young for you, Carol. And so we're fighting the whole trip. So when we start the sailboat race, we had not met him yet. We knew which boat he was on, and the two of us were up on the foredeck. And now the starting line is really chaotic because everybody's trying to get across first. So there's a great chance of collision. And our job was to be up on the foredeck, looking on both sides of the sail and making sure we were clear to cross the starting line. But we had the binoculars out and we were trying to see who could see him first. And she's pulling them out of my hands, and I'm pulling them out of her hands and we're slapping each other. And my dad is in the back, going, If I have to come up there, don't make me turn this boat around. Yeah, exactly. So we were fighting over him the entire start. And um, and believe it or not, his boat went over the line first.

Jim 9:59

Oh, yeah, I won the start. He won the start, yeah.

Alison 10:03

It was a four-hour race, so his lead did not last long.

Selling Everything For Circumnavigation

Jim 10:09

So obviously you both love sailing, but you know, Rita and I, uh a couple years ago, we tried selling everything and traveling the world by by land and air. What made you decide that you wanted to sell everything and sail around the world?

Alison 10:21

Because I had that dream, and after the race was over, we spent these three-day weekends together, and he was getting ready to go back to Philadelphia, and I was getting ready to go back to Charlotte. We're at a bar, and we're, you know, we we knew we had this amazing connection. And at one point he said, you know, someday I want to sail around the world. I'm like, me too, let's get married. So we did less than a year later.

Dan 10:46

Wow.

Rita 10:46

You have children, right?

Alison 10:48

Yes, we do. Three children and five grandchildren.

Rita 10:51

Okay, how do you manage seeing them? Do they come to live with you on the boat occasionally?

Alison 10:57

Well, you funny you should ask because just last week my daughter and her three-year-old and five-year-old boys came and spent a week with us, and it was absolutely incredible. Yeah.

Rita 11:08

That that's why we keep a home base here in the US because we have nine grandkids and four kids.

Alison 11:15

But they um FaceTime me all the time. Yeah. What I'm looking at and the sea creatures that are around my boat. And each of our kids has a map of the world, and it it's a place where you can put a stick pin in for each, you know, given location. And as we sail around the world, I send this, I make them online. It's an eight-fold postcard, accordion postcard. And I do pictures of us and where we are and stories and all kinds of images, and then they put a pin in the map.

Rita 11:43

Well, we lived six years in Ecuador, and ours came down quite a bit.

Alison 11:47

It's easier to have them when you're on land. Logistics of getting to our boat is really difficult.

Jim 11:53

I can imagine.

Dan 11:54

We left eight years ago, and that first year that we were gone, we had our entire all of our kids came down at least once, but only one of them had a grandchild at the time. I had one of our grandchild. Uh-huh. The other the other two didn't. And then since then, the other two have had two each, and so we now have five. And it's a lot harder to go and visit people plus further away. So we haven't had the first year was a lot, and then up until last week, there'd been very few. You know, once during COVID, they came out to visit us, but other than that, they haven't been on board.

Jim 13:14

Yeah, and by the way, we don't judge you for your fast relationship. I think Rita and I knew each other for about two, three weeks before we were living together.

Rita 13:21

Yeah, that's true.

Dan 13:23

When you know I proposed I proposed to her on the fourth day I knew her.

Jim 13:28

That's a little faster. But we we bought that property in Cambridge together. I think we'd known each other about three months.

Rita 13:35

And our kids about had a heart attack. We bought a penthouse apartment. And we were in Hawaii and we saw it in the Washington Post, and we said, Hey, let's go to that auction. I think we should buy that. And we did. That's cool. Yeah.

Jim 13:51

Now, you know, we know a horsewoman who's uh planning to move to Panama to retire. They're having their place built now. And one of the biggest difficulties that she's facing is saying goodbye

Leaving Horses Behind Without Regret

Jim 14:00

to her horses. Yeah. Was that a hard choice for you to make?

Alison 14:03

Yeah, it really was. My and I mean, I wanted one, I raised dwarf Nigerian goats and have my own goat milk, and I had my own chicken eggs, and I just asked him to bring one goat and one chicken on board. I'm like, that's all I want, honey. And he said no. So I get that. But as a consolation, our boat is named Equis, which is Latin for horse, and our spinnaker is a giant, has a horse, giant horse head on it. So when we fly our spinnaker and we're racing across the ocean, I am being carried by my sea pony.

Jim 14:31

That's right. Well, for eight years now, you must have covered a lot of territory. Oh yeah.

Dan 14:36

Uh nearly 30,000 miles.

Alison 14:39

Wow. In 50 countries. That's wonderful.

Jim 14:43

Where did you start out at?

Dan 14:44

Well, we we started in Delaware.

Rita 14:47

Oh, yeah.

Dan 14:48

We but we bought the boat in in Brunswick, Georgia, in 2015 and brought the boat up close to where we were so we could outfit it and get it ready to sail. But we actually shoved off the dock lines. We were in a C and D canal in a marina in the middle of it, and that's where we started from. And the rest is history.

Rita 15:07

Did it freak your kids out?

Alison 15:09

No, they they've always known that this was a plan of ours, and they've they never not one of them has ever said, Oh, mom and dad, don't do that. We did promise them every time they had a baby that we would fly back and spend a month for the birth of the baby and the first month cooking and cleaning and helping them and you know, caring for them. And darn it if they haven't had four since we've left. And I think they planned it. I'm like, okay, you have one this year, you have one next year, we'll get them home at least once a year. Yeah, it worked. Yeah.

Dan 15:37

But we we did have to sell the farm to get rid of uh our middle child out of the house.

Rita 15:41

Yeah, yeah, I can I've seen we can identify with that.

Jim 15:45

Yeah, we got a grandson like that.

Rita 15:46

Yeah, we do, exactly.

Jim 15:48

Well, over eight years, it it can't all have been smooth sailing. But what's your worst uh storm experience and how did it affect you?

Alison 15:56

When Dan had been out on the

Gulf Stream Storm And Real Damage

Alison 15:57

ocean in in merchant boats and was very comfortable with the sea, me not so much. So as we were traveling around and educating ourselves on this sailing experience, I decided I needed to take a training passage because we we were listening to this man, John Kretschmer, who was giving a seminar on sailing in storms, which was my biggest fear. And at the end of his seminar, he said, I have this thousand mile training passage that you can come on and it'll take you out in the you know, November and the trade winds, it'll be spicy sailing, and you will definitely get a feel of what it's like to sail in in big seas. I said, Dan, I have to do this. It's not a want, it's a need. So we did this thousand mile training passage, and I thought we were, you know, yeah, I'm good to go. This is gonna be great. But our very first ocean crossing, I wanted to do it with a rally, and a rally is where a bunch of boats get together. You have people who come on board and check for safety equipment, they do seminars.

Dan 16:50

It's a support system.

Alison 16:52

Okay. And and you all cross together with a weather router, so I thought there's safety in numbers. Well, I was really wrong because we all set out on the day of you know, to begin this 1200-mile crossing from the east coast of the United States to Tortola. Tortola. Okay. And we we had to go down the coast of the US because we wanted to cross the Gulf Stream around North Carolina because that's where it's the thinnest, because the Gulf Stream can be notorious. But before we got to the Gulf Stream, we heard a cavitation and noise in our prop. And Dan is like, do we really want to cross an ocean if there's something wrong with our boat? And we both said no. So we diverted, we went back to shore, and the rest of the fleet moved on and we pulled our boat out of the water. We had three different sets of experts come and look, and nobody could find anything wrong with our boat. So we put it back in the water. And then one morning the weather router contacted us and said, if you don't leave right now to get across the Gulf Stream, you're gonna be stuck for another two weeks.

Dan 17:52

We sat and waited there for over 10 days or so for the next time we could actually cross the Gulf Stream safely. And then finally he said, Yeah, you need to go today and you'll be fine.

Alison 18:02

And he goes, if you don't go, there's storm systems coming, and it's gonna be like 10 days before you can leave.

Dan 18:07

Minimum before you can leave.

Alison 18:09

So we set off, and the first 24 hours across the Gulf Stream were great. Like it was beautiful, perfect. You know, the the waves were gentle, the wind was perfect, and I thought, oh, this is a great beginning. And then the morning of the next day, Dan had just I just relieved him off his shift, and he came down. It was about five in the morning, and it's dark, and I'm just sitting at the helm taking my watch, and there's the sun came up over the horizon, and light filtered over the waves. I see this giant wave coming for us. I'm like, oh my gosh. And I'm holding on, and the boat just went up and over the wave really smoothly and back down again. And I'm like, well, that didn't feel bad. And then I see a next one coming, it's the same size, and I suddenly realize, holy crap, this is the size of the waves, and they are huge. So I pound my foot on the floor because their bunk is right underneath the cockpit area. I'm pounding on the floor. I'm like, Dan, you gotta come up here. And he's like, What the matter? What's the matter? I'm like, look at the size of these waves. And he's going, Yeah, they're they're pretty big. Okay, I'm going back. I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. I can't do this. So he had to, you know, with less than 15 minutes sleep, come back up and take another watch. And I went down, and that's when the proverbial hit the fan because we were in. Have you seen the movie A Perfect Storm? Yes. Okay, we had a storm behind us and a storm in front of us, and it was making the waves get closer and closer together, and they got bigger and bigger. And within a couple of hours, we had 18 to 20 foot waves breaking on the bow of our boat. Wow. And it was devastating. We had $14,000 worth of damage. Our dinghy got washed through the lifelines, it got ripped off the deck. The entire handrails it was secured to pulled out of the deck, leaving holes in the deck, which meant water was now coming in through our ceiling panels and it was raining inside the boat. And when the dinghy got washed through the lifelines, uh, it was filled with scuba gear and all kinds of equipment because we're using it for storage, it was still tied to the mast. So now, as it's as it's banging against the side of the boat, it's threatening to take our mast off the boat. And Dan had to tie into the jack lines and he had to go out on the deck. And he's first trying to pull it up, and I'm screaming at him, You can't even do it with the two of us.

Dan 20:15

I'm not losing a dinghy.

Alison 20:17

And I had to get a knife to him, and then he'd go back up there and he had to cut it free. And when I saw how quickly it disappeared, like in a blink of an eye, it was gone.

Dan 20:26

One wave. Crested one wave and it was gone forever.

Alison 20:28

And I said, if something happens to him, I'm just jumping in and going with him because I will not be on this boat by myself. Like, I will not do that. I would rather die. So we turned around, we went back to shore. We did five days, 700 miles, and ended up 20 miles where we started with $14,000 worth of damage to our boat. Wow. And insurance paid for every dime, but what it did to me on the inside, the PTSD that it caused from that day forward, that that's still there.

Dan 20:56

It wasn't the best start.

Jim 20:57

Yeah. What was it hard getting out again after that?

Alison 21:00

Well, you know, the funny thing is that when we arrived and we limped into this little marina in Southampton.

Dan 21:06

No, uh Southport.

Alison 21:07

Sorry, Southport, North

PTSD Recovery And A Timely Mentor

Alison 21:09

Carolina, North Carolina. I was feeling really sorry for ourselves, and I had to take all us blankets and sheets and everything up to uh to the laundry mat to wash them because they were all salt watered because of the release and I'm ceiling. And I was a quarter shy of getting my laundry done, and I begged this lady to a load. Thanks, Dan. If I could borrow a quarter because I just I needed one more quarter and I didn't have it. And she's like, absolutely. So I started talking to her, and it was the day before Thanksgiving, and she was really sweet. And I said, you know what, we're here and alone and supposed to be in the tortola right now. But would you like to come have Thanksgiving dinner with us? I've got some Cornish game pens and I will cook them for Thanksgiving dinner. So they came over and we listened to their life story, and it made us look like wimps. They suffered heart attacks, cancer, back like all these horrible things that happened to them.

Dan 21:58

And I thought And they were still trying.

Alison 22:00

And I thought, like, how weak am I?

Dan 22:02

Yeah.

Alison 22:03

That I can't do this. So, you know, our boat got all repaired and we crossed the Atlantic again. This time it was it was still rough, and I felt myself getting really anxious every time the winter.

Dan 22:15

Next year. I mean, we we waited a whole year. We we did the east coast of the US that year and the Bahamas. So we really didn't venture that far off sea again. Right.

Alison 22:24

And we didn't have like any any scary experiences, but crossing the Atlantic again, my fear really built up, especially when it got rougher than it was supposed to. I would have like panic attacks, anxiety. And by the time we got to the Virgin Islands, I was like, I've got to tell him I can't do this. It's not worth it. Like, you can get crew and cross with crew, and I'll fly and meet you there. So we were in going into the port of which island? Saint Martin. And there was a hundred boats anchored there. And it's where we were getting ready to cross to go to Bermuda to Bermuda. And then our next boat is rocking. And I'm like, today's the day I'm gonna tell them. And we pulled there's a hundred boats in there, right? And three boats away, you'll never guess who was on that boat. John Cressner, the man we did my training passes with, my mentor.

Dan 23:11

Her mentor was three boats away.

Alison 23:13

And I called him on the radio and I'm like, John, it's Dan and Alison. We bought our boat. We're out here sailing. I mean, the earth is covered by 80% water. There are millions of islands and millions of harbor. And the man that I looked up to most in the world for sailing was three boats away. So we go over and we start talking to him. And he goes, Allison, how's it going? And I start tearing up. I'm like, John, it's so awful. We are in this storm and I'm just so scared now. And I told him the whole thing. And he starts laughing at me. And I'm going, Why are you laughing? Why are you smiling? He goes, Do you know how lucky you are? And I'm like, no. He said, Your boat did fine. Your husband did great. And most importantly, you're still out here. He goes, Do you know how many people have quit? And he goes, The chances numerically of you ever being in that situation again are zero. He goes, You've got this. And he was the only person on the planet that could have looked at me and told me that and I would have believed him. He had been in three hurricanes and two typhoons on boats and survived them. And here I'm like, this man knows what he's talking about. I'm like, okay, I got this. And I've been out here eight years and we're still gone because of that moment. Oh, I do, I do. I'm sure. And Dan is he's probably the only man on the planet that wouldn't have not thrown me overboard by now, to be honest. Like, he just he's so patient and so good with me when I break down. And I think anybody else would have thrown me overboard by now.

Jim 24:34

Yeah, I was gonna bring up that because Rita and I travel well as a couple, and that can be rare. I mean, we know a few people that have real problems.

Rita 24:41

And we don't want to be with

Staying Strong As A Boat Couple

Rita 24:42

those. Oh, I don't blame you.

Jim 24:45

You know, even when we're traveling, one of us can stay in the apartment while someone else goes out. You know, we're not stuck in a little small space surrounded by miles and miles of water.

Rita 24:54

Right.

Jim 24:55

That must really put a relationship to the test. Do you have any like secrets to pass on after eight years on the seas together? Little couples counseling?

Dan 25:02

Um we've always been good together. We pretty much did everything together. So even in our horse lives, we would travel together with her vaulting team. I would be the truck driver and drive all the kids down there and be the support. And then I played polo, and she was a much better rider than I was at the start. I didn't write at all. But when I started learning how to play polo, and the polo was was my life at that point, just the best game ever. She decided that to be together, we couldn't both afford to both play polo. So she became an umpire. And so she would be at every game with with us, and and I would play, and then she would be the umpire for the game, and we were together at all times then. The only downside was she only blew whistles on me for the first year.

Alison 25:49

That's not true. Istles on other people too.

Jim 25:53

Yeah, I think we found that if you if you have a good relationship, then stress is going to make it better. Yeah. And if you have a bad relationship, stress is gonna make it worse.

Rita 26:02

Yeah, I think so. So you've definitely been tested.

Jim 26:05

Yeah.

Dan 26:05

It's it's all how you handle it, how you handle the stress. Yeah.

Jim 26:08

So let's switch it up here a bit and talk about your books, Allison. Uh looking at your website, which is AlisonGieschen.com, you cover quite a few categories. There's there's

Turning Travel Into Books That Teach

Jim 26:18

nonfiction, there's memoir, fantasy, and even children's literature. Can you kind of run down the list for us, maybe a little thumbnail description?

Alison 26:26

So my first book was Blue Ridge, and I wrote that because my mother, uh, I was an English major in college. So writing was, and I was an English teacher, so writing was something that I loved. And she says, I'm really tired of reading these Samani books. There's nothing good about, you know, out there for people my age. I want a book about this, this, this, and this. I'm like, and she's you gotta write it for me. I'm like, okay, mom. So I sat down and in four weeks I wrote a novel and I published it. And it got the iUniverse Rising Star Award. So I'm like, well, I can do this. And then I just started writing. I wrote uh our big draft horse that we use for vaulting, fell into an icy lake and almost died. And he had his Animal Planet episode, and he was like this major star in our area. So I wrote his memoir, and then it just blossomed from there. That was my, you know, so I wrote a fiction and a nonfiction. So now all of my books, whether they're children's books or fantasy or our memoirs, are all based on my experiences. So e like I said, you know, I scuba dive. So all of the sea life in my two children's mermaid books are about real life under the sea. So everything I see and it and I experience, I I weave into my stories. And it doesn't matter if it's fiction or nonfiction.

Jim 27:33

Well, the horses certainly show up in the seven.

Alison 27:35

Oh, yeah. That came from a dream. That one was is like a totally different genre. We have our two riding the ways of reality books, and Dan is just now finishing editing the third one. So our third one won't be out soon. But the seven, uh unfortunately, when I sleep at night, I'm still taking care of horses because I did it all my life.

Rita 27:54

Yeah.

Alison 27:55

And at night I am throwing them hay, they're getting out. I just like am working every night taking care of these animals. And it really, you know, bothers me because I'm like, I just would like to get some rest without horses interrupting it. But one night I had this dream and I didn't know the horses in my dream. And it was really odd, and it was a very different feeling dream. It wasn't like my normal dreams. And in this dream, I discovered that the horses could see inside the hearts of humans and judge whether or not they were good people. And when I woke up from that, I can remember that day. I went up to Dan. I said, Damn, I had this dream, and I told him about it. And I said, I have to make this into a story. So I did.

Jim 28:30

And that was the germ of the seven.

Alison 28:32

And that was what made the seven. Yep. So seven, seven humans are picked from the pool of humanity. And those seven people, whether they appreciate the gifts of the earth or they if the the majority do, humanity will be saved.

Dan 28:46

They all have an encounter with the horse.

Alison 28:48

And the horses are their judges, not God. These horses, the horses were placed on the planet to evolve alongside with man, just for the eventuality that someday, if the humans no longer appreciate the gifts of the earth, humanity be erased and start again. If they did, then humanity would continue. Yeah.

Jim 29:08

You can obviously see how the different cultures that you've witnessed have had a big influence on your work.

Alison 29:13

Well, each of the seven characters comes from a different place, a different place in the world.

Dan 29:18

Or a different person she's met.

Alison 29:20

And but all of the facts about their the cultures and the history of the cultures and the locations of where they live and the breeds of horses that originated there, everything about that is 100% factual. So I had to do a lot of research. But either the person or the place has a special meaning to me.

Jim 29:38

Yeah, I was going to say in these troubled times, Rita and I have found that meeting people when we travel is about the only thing that gives us any hope at all for humanity.

Alison 29:46

I know. And you know, when growing up in the US, you have this conception that, you know, other cultures are so different and the people are different and they have different, but when you learn how to say hello and you smile and you know please and thank you, and you go into a new culture, you're just embraced by the kindest and nicest people. And you realize all people are the same all over the world. You know, there's there's really no bridges and barriers to to to being a kind human being, and it's just very, very prevalent.

Rita 30:13

We all want the same things, you know, be able to raise our families and live a good life.

Alison 30:20

Absolutely. And that's really changed our perspective of the world.

Jim 30:24

Yeah, one question I have as a writer myself where do you find time to do this?

Alison 30:29

I live on a boat.

Dan 30:30

Where else am I gonna go?

Jim 30:32

What else are you gonna do?

Dan 30:34

It takes 30 days to cross the Pacific.

Jim 30:39

You must be busy though. I mean, I'm sure there's stuff to do. You're not just sitting, it's not like sitting on a boat.

Dan 30:44

I'm busy.

Alison 30:45

I cook, I clean and I write. Those are my three jobs. Feed Dan, because you would starve to death. A man does not cook or eat unless I put food in front of him. So I cook, I clean, and I write.

Dan 30:56

It's a symbiotic relationship.

Jim 30:58

Oh, how has it changed your life having so few possessions? I mean, it's just what you have on the boat, basically, right?

Alison 31:04

Yeah, it's it's very liberating because we we realized

Minimalism And Life Without Stuff

Alison 31:08

that when we lived at home, you're working for stuff. You're working to put gas in your car, to buy cars, to keep your house, you're working to, you know, get new things, and all those possessions distract you from living life. When you have nothing and your only purpose is to journey and see the world and you're not tied down to working for stuff, I think it really opens you to live a much more joyful and appreciative life.

Dan 31:31

Yeah, it's so funny because when we uh when we finally sold the farm, we got rid of everything. We didn't want to have something tying us, you know, other than our kids, to come back to. So we sold everything, everything, all the stuff we had up in the barn, everything in the house. We went on an estate sale, and we whittled everything down to a pickup truck full of stuff. And we drove that down to our boat. And then as we're loading that onto the boat, we're going, we don't even have room for this. There's no way we're gonna half of that pickup truck just stayed in the back of the pickup truck, and we ended up getting rid of that too. So, yeah, it's it's really a challenge to let go of everything because we we thought we absolutely had half everything in that pickup.

Alison 32:14

Yeah, yeah, and we needed none of it. I would say nothing from that pickup truck is still on our boat. Nothing.

Jim 32:20

Yeah, as a former educator, you use storytelling in your children's literature to teach lessons about culture and resilience. How much has that affected your writing, the the exposure to the different cultures?

Alison 32:31

100%. Absolutely 100%.

Jim 32:34

And it's an important lesson to pass on to children, I think, too.

Alison 32:37

Yeah, it is, absolutely. There's my story, my children's works are not really cultural experiences. One is called Julia's Vaulting Dream, and it's about a girl that discovers the sport of equestrian vaulting, which is what I taught for 25 years. And the other two are mermaids. So I haven't experienced a mermaid culture yet, but I'm still looking every time I go down. I am gonna find myself a mermaid.

Jim 32:57

You never know, right? There's a lot of freedom involved in sailing, but then writing requires a lot of discipline. So what kind of connection have you found between those two pastimes?

Alison 33:09

Okay, so sailing, there's a lot less distractions than living on land, and there's a lot more time to sit down and immerse myself in my writing. So, you know, people on land, if they want to write, they have to go find a cabin somewhere, or they have to, you know, get up at four in the morning and spend hours in the week time of the morning writing. And me, I can sit down and literally spend day after day, like I will crank out my stories in an amazing short period of time because I don't have any distractions on a boat, other than Dan having to feed him. But, you know, it's just it's it's a it's incredible. It's like this gift. If you want to be a writer, I suggest getting a boat.

Jim 33:45

What about the future for you? Do you see yourselves doing this, you know, five years, 10 years in the future?

Alison 33:52

Well, when we first set out, we Dan

Future Route Plans And Favorite Places

Alison 33:54

had this very nicely mapped out chart of where we were going to go when we were gonna be there. And the first lesson we learned is we're never gonna be anywhere we expect to be when we're when we thought we would be there. And that hit us like you know a brick when we got stuck in Ireland for two years because of COVID. And, you know, we've had delays in five countries or more, five countries for three months or more waiting for boat parts. So we have just tossed that whole thing out the window. We take it day to day and we know we're exactly where we are, when we're meant to be there, and we don't look past tomorrow. We really don't. So if somebody says, you know, where you where are you going? Well, we think we're going here, but we don't know. And they're like, Well, how long are you gonna sell? We're like, we have no idea. Yeah, like we might die, so why plan?

Rita 34:39

You know, we just we kind of go where the wind blows once we I mean, we have a basic idea of what we're gonna do, but it doesn't, it's not set in stone.

Dan 34:49

We we always have to have some long-term goal. Right now, we we have to get out of the South Pacific before November. Hurricane here. So we we have that you know, deadline on us. But right now we're kind of stuck here waiting to uh get our rudder repaired because it got damaged a month ago.

Jim 35:10

Where are you planning on going from here?

Dan 35:12

Uh we're we're heading west. We're gonna head from here through the Cook Islands to Tonga and then down to New Zealand by November.

Alison 35:19

Oh, definitely.

Dan 35:20

That's the plan.

Alison 35:21

Hopefully.

Dan 35:22

Hopefully. Hopefully.

Jim 35:24

That general direction.

Dan 35:25

Yes, yes, yes. We're gonna continue, continue west in the trade winds.

Jim 35:29

I'm gonna ask you the question that we get all the time and hate the most. Did you have a favorite protocol?

Alison 35:34

Thanks. A favorite protocol, yeah.

Dan 35:37

A favorite portal. Uh yeah, actually, we um we both really enjoyed the Azores. Oh we we agree that that is one of our favorite things, probably our favorite place to have been. And we enjoy all the places, but we look back on that one going, yeah, that was just kind of magical.

Rita 35:55

Would you ever see yourself having a small house or somewhere or no?

Dan 36:01

Somewhere, yeah. Eventually, I think we're gonna have to get off this. But right now, the way things are going, the the 10-year plan is just straight out the window. So, because we've actually we'll we'll hit the next year and we're only halfway through. So it's been extended a little bit, and uh, we're just gonna take it as it goes, and eventually we'll get old enough that we we can't do this, although we've met many 80, 90 year old people.

Alison 36:29

We spend the rest of our lives on this boat until they have to put us in an old folks' home.

Dan 36:33

As long as we're we're still alive, still alive, and still afloat. Uh we'll we'll keep keep moving on.

Jim 36:41

Well, we've been chatting with Alison Gieschen and her husband Dan, currently in Tahiti, in the eighth year of their plan to sail around the world. You can find out more about them on her website, AlisonGieschen.com

Where To Find Them Online

Jim 36:51

or sailmates.org, and we'll have links to the website in the show notes. Don't forget to check out their YouTube page and connect to them on social media. On that same site, you'll find her blog, links to all of her books, and some beautiful photos and a whole lot more. Alison, Dan, thanks for joining us on Wherever We May Roam.

Alison 37:09

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Jim 37:11

Before we go, a quick update on our travel planning for our trip to Europe of almost three months this spring. Another early booking. It occurred to us after finding

Europe Trip Planning And Booking Lessons

Jim 37:20

a few options in Copenhagen where our cruise starts, that maybe some cruisers had the same idea of arriving early. That led us to realizing that at the end of the cruise, when they dump us in Reykjavik, the other three thousand passengers may also want to stay a night or two. And we would all be flying out of the same airport. Also, it would be mid-June, right at the beginning of the tourist season, so there's probably no time to waste. Now I had previously looked into hotels, and there was a decent one for about a hundred dollars a night right by the airport. Well, when we got online to book something, we found that our room and everything else by the airport was already booked. And we're talking ten months from now. We were able to find a good hotel, even has a kitchenette, and it's near a stop for the airport bus. It was almost twice the cost of the one I looked at a month or so ago. So our plan right now is to stay just one night and fly out the next day. As to the flight, well, we'll cover that next time. So that's all for now. Join us next week when we'll be speaking with a man who drove the full length of Africa in a Volkswagen bus. Until then, remember we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us. If you've been thinking about traveling longer or just traveling better, we hope this episode gave you a few more ideas. Remember, there's no right or wrong way to

Closing Thoughts And Listener Support

Jim 38:40

explore the world. Only the way that works for you. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow the podcast, and if you have a moment, leave a quick review. It really helps more people find us. And if you want to go deeper, you can check out my book, Wherever We May Roam, Finding Your Travel Style, where I walk through all of this in more detail. You can search for it on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Audiobook, or just use the link on our podcast page. If you have any questions, a topic you would like discussed, or would like to be on our show, email us at Jim @ jimsantosbooks.com. Thanks for listening, and as always, safe travels wherever you may roam.