(Audrey Adamson)

Gosh, I just can’t believe two full years have gone by since we stepped of LUSH, brining an end to our epic 22month circumnavigation!! Firstly, big apologies for not blogging in ages, we’ve had a busy couple of years to say the least. Yes, we wrote the book. In fact, we completed our first draft over a year and half ago but sadly we’ve fallen foul of first draft syndrome and it’s been sitting on the shelf gathering dust ever since. The good news is we’re not going to leave it there forever, especially as so many of you have been in touch asking for copies. And that’s also why I’m blogging again today. There’s been such a massive amount of genuine interest in our voyage that we simply can’t ignore it! So we thank you, our faithful readers, for your enthusiasm and encouragement. We have enjoyed hearing how our mantra of ‘One Life… Live it’ has impacted on your lives and is a belief you too live by and inspire others to do the same! It’s the ripple effect and we just love it!!! Keep it up!

One thing a lot of our friends and family feared for us when taking on the awesome adventure like we did is that we’d never ‘settle’ once we got back on terra firma. Well, the truth is when you’ve spent the guts of two years on a superyacht sailing through the tropics from one stunning island archipelago to the next, life on land and in a temperate climate takes a bit of getting used to, for sure! Yes, there is a lull in time before you get back into your rhythm again. What I found most difficult settling into ‘normality’ was being indoors so much, everything seamed to have four walls and a roof… you live inside a box, you travel to work in a box (I do try to walk as much as possible!), you work in a box, you socalise a lot indoors etc.. While I paid some attention to the sky, clouds and sun during the day and the moon and stars at night, honestly it just paled into the background of my life in comparison to the foreground it had taken the previous two years.

Life on a yacht is really life Al fresco, albeit I did spend a fair bit of time in the galley, it’s just wholly different. When you live on the sea you are connected to the rhythm of the planet more so than anywhere else on earth. Your ‘ground’ is constantly moving, you can feel it through the motion of your yacht, you can smell it, taste it, see it, hear it and touch it. I’ll not pretend to consistently love the motion of the ocean, as you’ll know from reading previous blogs I have suffered from the odd bout of seasickness betimes. But, on land I miss that motion, I miss that energy, I miss Neptune’s world. On a yacht the horizon stretches out every side of you, the deep blue sea encapsulates you and then there is the sky and it’s ever changing visage, even in the tropics there’s plenty to see aloft. You watch the sun rise and set in awe and appreciation, and every time a different view. You watch the towering tropical cumulus clouds dance about in the trade winds. And when the night falls you wait to see what show the universe will put on for you, just you alone in the cockpit with the Heavens, while adjusting your sails and holding course for our next destination. It wasn’t just the universe that put on a display at night, the ocean would often light up from phosphoresence as LUSH cut through the water. What a spectacle! Such magic moments, and now such magic memories…

And so we stepped off LUSH mid Sept 2014 and I guess the question is what do you do once you’ve achieved your ultimate dream, what next? Well, luckily for me I had a couple of distractions thrown my way. The first of these was that my three sisters along with 24 first cousins and three uncles had decided that they were going to all run the Dublin Marathon at the end of October and break the World Record for the most family members to run a marathon. It was only 6 weeks away and I had absolutely no intention or ambition to run a marathon (I did one years earlier and had said “Never Again!”). However, with so many of my family doing it and raising money for a Charity in memory of my lovely cousin, Maire, who sadly passed away a year earlier, I couldn’t say no. Thankfully I did those daily ‘dance-offs’ on LUSH so at least I started with some level of fitness but I hadn’t run a mile in years! And so for the record (as I couldn’t find this anywhere on the web, when googling it, at the time) it is possible to train-for and run a marathon within 6 weeks!! If you have your whole family and extended family doing it too and you raise €50K for Charity anything is possible. I did spend days in an ice bath after it and could hardly walk for weeks!

And by the time November came and I could walk again I was pregnant!!!!!

Yes folks ye heard it right!

Stay tuned here for a follow-up blog in the coming weeks but to give you a little taster of how absolutely amazing life is I’ve got four words….

New Life… Love it!!!!!

Audrey xxx

PS We made it into the Guinness Book of Records Annual for 2017, two years after breaking the record! Whoop whoop!

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