When we last wrote about the Schulte family (Pat, Ali, and their daughter, Ouest, 11, and son, Lowe, 9) a year ago, they were heading for Aruba on their 1984 Grand Banks 42 Bumfuzzle. They had been cruising in the Caribbean ever since they bought the boat in Florida in 2017. After Aruba, they planned to head for Colombia, and then…who knows.
But Covid intervened. As nation after nation shut down, or adopted protocols not exactly welcoming to foreign cruising families, they left the boat in Aruba and flew home to the U.S. Now, they’re back in Aruba, and they’ve put Bumfuzzle back in the water after a year on the hard. And they’re figuring out where to go next.
The Schultes are not your average family. Pat and Ali have been traveling, on land and on sea, since he quit his commodities-trading job in Chicago in 2003. They sailed around the world. They drove a 1958 VW bus from Alaska to Argentina.
So last year, stuck in Aruba, they decided to return to the U.S. in their own fashion. They bought a 31-foot Bluebird Wanderlodge bus/RV over the internet, sight unseen. Ali and the kids flew home to visit family in Minnesota while Pat flew to Dayton, Ohio, to pick up their new home. (The first day, once he had actually seen the bus, Pat had to buy four new tires.)
They then got back together, drove the bus to Florida and ultimately across the country to Arizona, to visit other members of their family, usually staying in RV parks or state parks along the way. But the RV life paled.
“We decided that we’re not too keen on the idea of RVing in the states in the summer,” Pat wrote on their blog, bumfuzzle.com, “and we’re all sort of missing the boat life again, which was one of the reasons we decided to buy an inexpensive motorhome in the first place.”
They flew back to Aruba, where Pat says Bumfuzzle’s “engines fired instantly, as if they had been run up just yesterday.” They moved the boat out of the marina to an anchorage basically around the corner.
“The wind in Aruba is crazy right now, just howling all day long, every day,” Pat wrote last week. “However, moving out of the marina and one mile around the corner to the anchorage doesn’t require any offshore beatings.”
What’s next? Colombia may be back in the picture, or Panama, or…Stay tuned. Read more:
