Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Kimberly, welcome aboard to the show today. So happy to have you.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Great to be here.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: I want to ask what created the book Crew of Three, if you can tell us that story.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Well, the crew of three has been in existence since 2024. When my daughter was born.
My husband and I always envisioned a big, giant family, and we were able to have one child. And then we were not able to grow our family anymore and had kind of a before and after experience where we talked about adoption, we talked about surrogacy, we talked about a number of different ways of growing our family, and we decided we had one super healthy child. Neither one of us were spring chickens when we had kids. And so we decided this was. This was what the plan was. But I was watching and waiting and not quite accepting of that was where we were.
We flew home on an airplane and I looked down an aisle, which, or the row that we were sitting on, and there was my husband and my daughter Allie and me. And I said, you know what?
This is my family. And it was a very profound moment for me. It was kind of a before and after. And so then we started to talk about, well, what would we do with one child, we might not do with three or four. And even though I know an awful lot of people who travel with a lot of kids, we. The first thing we came up with was an RV trip and we bought an RV. We spent five months schooling around the country. We 32 states, I think 17 national parks, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 miles over the course of five months. And we decided, hey, this little crew of three thing works. It still gives me my own personal time. So we used to have mommy days, daddy days, and family days.
But the crew of three, the book was born after we took a sailing adventure and we took off for two years.
A decade ago now, in 2013, we took off and with my husband Michael, my daughter allie, who was 10 at the time, and me, and we sailed from Massachusetts in the east coast of the US all the way down to Grenada in the eastern Caribbean. And we waited out hurricane season there, turned around and sailed our way back up. And so we spent two years living aboard our boat.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: You were sailing yourself, or did you have somebody who helped you with that?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Nope, it was just the three of us. My husband is quite a. An accomplished sailor. He grew up on boats and he's been sailing his whole life. We'd taken another right after we got married. We took six weeks and we sailed up to Nova Scotia. So I knew I Trusted his skills, I trusted his ability on board. I did an awful lot of learning to. I'll never catch up to him. It's kind of like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's fault. Buyers where he's, he's had that 10,000 hours of mastery and I'll never catch up to him in the sailing skills world, but I certainly became proficient enough to be safe on board.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: I gotta say, from a personal perspective, I'm incredibly envious of you guys.
My dad actually built a boat, right? Sailing boat in the back of his. This is gonna go terribly wrong in a second. So hold on. In the back of our garden. And it burned down like a few weeks before it was sail ready. Now I won't go into the family intrigue around, you know, the blames that were sent there both sides around. But the thing is that it was always his dream to be, to do this kind of round world sailing experience. And after the boat burned down, we said, well, okay, it doesn't have to be your boat. Like you need to do this. This is the thing that you wanted to do your whole life. And then by, he was okay, next year, next year, next year. And then finally, unfortunately, he got diabetes. He became very sick and he just didn't have the physical ability to do that anymore. So, you know, if there's one thing that I'd like to share with the audience and maybe you would agree is live your dreams today. And I feel, Kimberly, like your family has definitely done that.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I have a motto and it's dream plan. Do you know your dream is never going to be the same as mine? It's kind of ironic that your dad built a boat and wanted sail around the world. No desire to sail around the world. Once I learned that going through the Panama Canal, it was 14 days until you got to the Galapagos, which I don't exactly think of as a destination necessarily. And then it would be another like 20 to 30 days in our boat to get to French Polynesian.
I decided I didn't need to go through the Panama. Now I'm, I'm, I'm not an offshore sailor.
The longest sail we did was 56 hours and which I think is a pretty long one, but it's really only a couple of days, two and a half days. I'm not one of these that can do 20 or 30 days at sea. And I have. So I know my limitations in that regard.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: I did my fair share of sailing. There's something comforting in being, you know, a certain distance from the Shore. Second, you can't see the shore. It's, it's. I don't know. To me it's terrifying. Especially if you are the person, you know, responsible for that. It's a, it's a whole different experience, I might say.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: I actually don't mind being off, you know, away from the shore. We did an awful lot of like 12 hour runs and those. It's interesting. They, I love being on watch at night. There's something extraordinarily calming about it.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Peaceful.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: I also like that I can see most trains because hopefully they're lit up, you know, when you're, when you're going at night. But it's also very peaceful and you feel, you know, the sky is right, you can reach and touch it.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: There's something about that moment where you kind of turn off the engines and you put the sails out and this absolute serenity and almost silence and just the, it's the sea and that's it. All the humming goes away. It's quite magical. Anybody who's gone through that moment really does appreciate it.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: I want to ask you, how has this affected your daughter Addie?
Has you felt that it's changed her in any fundamental way?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Well, to give you an example, she's 20, she's in her third year of university and she opted to apply only to schools in the uk. So she's at the University of Glasgow marching to her very own throne.
And that's. We were gone from the ages of 10 to 12, and when we came back, she had junior high and high school back in the same town where she grew up. And, you know, we're in a pretty small town here and my husband and I said if we give her one thing when she comes back, it's to be able to march to her own. And she definitely has that. She also is extraordinarily capable of problem solving.
One of the biggest things about living on a boat and really any kind of travel is being flexible. And, you know, if you're in the, in the UK and you end up with a rain strike, you have to figure out how to get where you're going because, you know, none of the kids there have cars. They have to figure out where you're going and got to get there by way of the buses or Ubers or walking or a bike. And so she's an extraordinarily good problem solver now and very much an independent banker.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: It's almost like the airline just set you up to be a good problem solver. If you do A lot of that. Were you referring to the volcano eruption? Where was that, Iceland, or did you get stuck in that one?
[00:08:27] Speaker B: No, we actually went to Montserrat, which I don't know if you're familiar with Jimmy Buffett's I Don't Know Where I'll Go when the Volcano Blows. That's his recording studio, used to be in Montserrat. And within very recent history, somewhere in the last two decades, the volcano there erupted and covered two thirds of an Island.
And 2/3 of the island are considered what they call the exclusionary zone.
And so, you know, here you have this island that used to exist and it's kind of a modern day Pompeii. You can see the very tips of a steeple of a church and that's how high the ash covered there and that what used to be their downtown area.
No, we did not get stuck in that. We just went to look at it and you know, observe it more than anything.
I'm not sure I would live on an island with an active volcano where it had already erupted in modern era either.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: It's funny, right? You get to these areas on the island and it's, it's like Devastation Trail or you know, whatever, all these kind of names that they give and it's like, it kind of is this rude awakening to like actually, you know, there are moments in time where, where it's incredibly dangerous to be where you're standing right now.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: It's. We, we laughed a lot of it. We went on a hike in Dominica called the Boiling Lake Hike. And you know, it's, it's active volcanoes are everywhere down in the Eastern Caribbean. And you know, you'd walk by steaming areas that, you know, everything had that sulfur rotten egg smell. And you'd walk by these hissing, steaming spots, you know, where in the United States with all of the legal issues and you know, sue happy world, we are able to walk in a place like that.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: What do you, what was your, you know, looking over many, many years of travel and living this dream, what is your most salient memory? What is the moment that you remember.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Now? It's interesting, the most impressive moment was after we had rented out our house, we had moved onto the boat and we were sailing out of our cove and I actually, I put this as the, my part of my description on the back and I'll read it to you what it says. As we sailed out of our cove, our home behind us and the complete unknown ahead, I couldn't help thinking that I was leaving everything I knew and loved, with the exception of Michael and Allie. Talk about being pushed past my comfort zone. And just about. I'm free ration.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: What did that feel like? If it's even describable.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: It'S probably the most tremendous display of faith I have ever shown.
Were we ready? Are you ever ready for something like that? I mean, we had. We were homeschooling our daughter. If you think the manual on raising kids is lacking, try the middle school manual. Holy cow.
Overwhelming, but peaceful at the same time. I remember writing in my journal that night, which happened to be my husband's birthday, but I remember writing in my journal that even though this thought was so daunting, you know, every single thing from that moment for the next two years was going to be new to me.
I remember thinking, I'm ready for this. Bring it on.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Was there any.
And I apologize for digging this up. Were there any disagreements pending this trip like we're.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Now. My husband is much more of a realist. And yes, I am. I am more of the. Let's go for it.
So it's funny, it's almost. It's almost backwards. Except for once he commits to something, he's doing it. And I may be a little more timid, like, oh, it was a really great idea.
I know. We. I laugh and I'm a gardener. I'm not a sailor. I love. We live on the water. I have a magnificent spot where I have a quarter of an acre of gardens. I mean, I am so inherently tied to the land that we live on that for me, hopping on a boat was such a crazy idea. And yet I trusted my husband.
You know, it's not. When you go on your own vessel, you are, you are. It. It is, It's a very pioneering feeling.
You know, my husband, I laugh and I say he is. He's certainly a very experienced sailor, but he's also a diesel and small engine mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter and a handyman. You know, and then I took over the role of, you know, chef and teacher. Okay, these are not jobs that we had trained for or had really, other than nominal skills, but just, you know, all of it was hands on experience.
And. But you were your. In medically. I mean, we had a very robust first aid kit, you know, down to sutures, and I thought, oh, Lord, please don't let me have to stitch anybody up. But, you know, that's. If you are.
If you're 40 hours from land, you are your own best source of survival in every way, whether it's the food, the education, the medical attention. And so a lot of, a lot of roles that you take.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: How did the school, homeschooling, how did that work? Was, was Ellie happy with this or was it a challenge for both of you?
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Well, go back to think about an 8 year old, for starters. So she was 8 when we landed on this idea that we had talked about it. We've always owned boats and we talked about it. My husband and I had gone for six weeks as an extended honeymoon right after we were married. And so we talked about a boat trip, get complacent. You know, something like that obviously takes a lot of work. And we had an experience where some friends of ours who we never thought would take the plunge, absolutely did, and sailed into our cove. So they're sitting there with us. And this was ironically, a guy I worked with at Oracle 30 years ago, and I thought he was just married to his job and the lifestyle of consulting. And he and his wife had a plan. And when their kids were three and five, they chucked it all, had a boat built down in Argentina, and they hired a captain and crew for however long they needed until they were comfortable sailing the boat on their own with their two small children.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Smart.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: And they had sailed from Bermuda to Newport, which were not far from Newport, Rhode Island. They had sailed from Bermuda to Newport, just the four of them. They had finally gotten to that stage where they were confident enough to take the boat on their own when they had sailed from Newport and were anchored out in our cove. When my husband and I said to each other, this is it. This is the proverbial sign.
Either now or decide not to do it, but don't let inertia stop us.
You know, I don't know if you have kids, but the whole idea with kids. Oh, gosh, yeah. So you get it. They age out of wanting to be with parents.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: And so we had an eight year old, we had one child, it was a perfect opportunity. And.
But they age out. And so we knew if we were going to travel for a couple of years, that we didn't want to be pushing onto those teenage years.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: And so we made that decision. We said, all right, it's now or never. We're either going to come up with a budget, figure out a way to make it work and do it, or we're going to decide that this is not a trip we want to do. And. But no, we were both in for a penny, in for a pound. We actually sold our old boat, we got a new boat or New to US boat, which was a catamaran. It's a little bit more comfortable for us family wise traveling. It's pretty small cataran for what we did, but perfect for us.
Ali was all in on the planning stages. The only thing she asked about the homeschooling was can I build a volcano? Well, little did I know we were going to go through this whole volcanic thing so you could build a volcano. And we did. We got a group of cruising kids and when we were stationary down in Grenada for hurricane season and we had about 30 kids down there, it's a, it's a entire community you don't really even know exists.
But there were about 30 kids ranging in age from 8 to 18.
And all of the kids participated. They were all making volcanoes and erupting them and, you know, dying the color food coloring and dying the doing the paper mache. And homeschool was not always that great. We happened to start our first couple months of the trip. My husband had to finish up a project and so we sailed from Massachusetts down to D.C.
i don't know if you've been to Washington D.C. but that's my hometown. And we had seven weeks and the perfect open air classroom we had. Every Smithsonian, every monument, every memorial, every way you could conceivably study history in the United States was at our fingertips.
I had to let go of the fact that I was trying to recreate a classroom experience because that's not at all what we were doing. She had to let go of the idea that mom didn't know what she was doing.
School was love, growing pains, bumps along the road more than anything. Being flexible. And that's both parent and child or student and teacher, everybody being flexible.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Tell me more about this idea of letting go of the traditional classroom.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Before we left.
We had to. We knew we were coming back home. It's a little different. Everyone who's out there has a little different story. We knew this for us was a sabbatical sin.
My husband and I would take a couple years off from any sort of work and we'd come back. We did not want to count on the fact that we would be able to do all of this in retirement. You know, as you found with your father, sometimes you get sick, sometimes you're not able, sometimes you lose a spouse. I mean, all of these things happen.
And so we decided, you know, let's go now. My Ali's young enough and. But we knew we were coming back into the same school system, into the same house. You know, obviously nobody can Predict what's going to happen. It's our plan. And so I worked with the school system on how do we leave and then come back in and make sure she was care in order to jump right back into junior high.
And so I had an idea of what subjects I wanted to cover.
And it's not that there's not a manual on homeschooling your child. It's that there are so many resources out there and ways of doing it. You can do a virtual classroom, which is basically like school on a computer. It's kind of what our kids did during COVID but we had no experience with that prior to Covid.
You can purchase entire set of curriculum that covers soup to nuts and generally that comes with a pretty hefty price tag and stacked out of books and materials. Or you can do the way that we did, which is we pieced it together and we took advantage of where we were, obviously geography and maps and you know, the fact that we track weather and make almost every single decision on the boat is based on the weather. And so she became an active part of that. And you know, watching fronts come through, watching hurricanes. Gratefully, the two years we were out were very lightweight hurricane seasons.
But the amount of attention she paid the year after we got home when hurricanes Irma and Maria came through and destroyed places that we had called home, you know, so you're looking at a 12 year old who knows where Barbuda is and that it is even a place and that there were people that lived there and that the Frigate Bird Sanctuary is there, you know, and so we were able to, rather than taking a curriculum that didn't pay attention to all these places we went, you know, that was just memorizing the state capitals of the, every state in the U.S. or the capitals of each country or, you know, the continents and you know, you could take it as a memorization game or you could take it as, you know, she was helping us plan where we're going and we're reading about places and how they became. They went from a French territory to a British territory to a Dutch independent to, you know, and so we learned about. She learned about a whole lot more because I let go of that, let's memorize the state passengers mentality.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: How does, how does Ellie reflect on that in retrospect? Does she feel that going through this experience compared to, let's say, traditional schooling that she also went through?
[00:24:13] Speaker B: It's interesting, she doesn't have anything to compare it to in terms of this was her life, you know, she came back and went into junior high.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: And they did travel. More than the idea of the boat in the home school was the part that she carried with her.
She came back and as a seventh grader, as a 12 year old, went on a school trip. And we're just at the public high school, junior high and high school here.
The, our school board had sanctioned a trip in the junior high level of called the Holocaust Corps.
And so when she was 12, she went with these two phenomenal teachers and I think 23 other kids. And they went to Holland.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Holland.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: They went to Holland. They went to Poland and they went to Germany.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: And they toured Auschwitz and, you know, these experiences. But think if she had not done what she'd done with us, she probably wouldn't have felt comfortable going on a trip. Like her.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: How old was she at the time?
[00:25:39] Speaker B: It was 12. She went on that trip. It was an amazing trip. And it really, really set the tone for mostly the life, you know, it just one. She saw so much more than, you know, it's 23, 24 kids out of, you know, a couple hundred in the junior high. And you think that, you know, this very small percentage of these kids went and had this very profound experience.
And you know, a few years later when she was 14, she went on another school trip. She went to England and Scotland.
And she was 14 years old when she fell in love with Scotland and she decided that was where she was going to college. And, you know, somebody said, how can you let your kid go that far away? And my husband and I have a very similar approach. We're like, how can you stop, you know, why would you stop her? And we didn't, we didn't discourage her, but we made her figure it out.
And let me tell you, there's not one single thing that's the same without applying for colleges and going to college over in Switzerland, as it is in the United States, or at least in the United States 40 years ago, you know, everything has so changed, but she was motivated to figure it out. And I think that this idea of, you know, living out of bounds, you know, not staying, being forced to stay inside the lines in a coloring book, I think that allowed her to do this. It's hard.
The whole timeline of going to school in the UK is entirely different from the United States.
Here by May 1, you make your decisions.
So in the UK, any of the kids from England are, don't even get their, their, their scores back from their levels until August.
There are people who don't know what Their plans are for four weeks later.
And you know, and so we had a few, you know, periods of time, particularly the senior breakfast, which I thought was such a delightful idea. Good. They get to have like just a day to reminisce. Oh, no, it's about everybody wearing the hoodie of where they're going.
And. And she didn't know it was either the university, it was either University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow or St. Andrews and St. Andrews and Glasgow's were her only firm and she didn't know about University of Edinburgh yet. And so I go up and from her trip and when she was 14, I pull out the Scotland hoodie and I'm like, here we go. You know, you're going there but you know, when you choose a different path, your different path has different steps and you have to be, you have to be strong enough and brave enough to walk that path.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Kimberly, what an absolute delight. I appreciate you. We have only one scripted question in the show and it's a difficult one. If you had to go back to 20 something year old Kimberly, what would your advice to her be?
[00:29:12] Speaker B: I would tell my 20 year old self to relax and go with the flow a bit more. He was very, very, very all about the five year plans and the eight year plans and doing that. I bought a house when I was 22. Oh, wow. Yeah. When I was managing a bank, you know, I would tell myself to relax and enjoy but it's okay to quit a job. I would. That's probably the biggest thing I would tell myself is whenever you're laid off or it's time to leave a job, embrace it as an opportunity for some really tremendous adventures.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Kimberly, thank you so much for joining today.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Thank you. This was a lot of fun.
