Soon home

Our last day on this trip is now over and it´s ever so bitersweet. We´re all rather tired and
extremely excited to see our families again. At the same time I believe quite many of us feel that
it´s rather sad to leave Gunilla. The boat has become our home the past 10 weeks and I could just
as easily navigate my way blindfolded around deck on Gunilla as I can in my house back in
Sweden.

No place has made me feel quite so fascinated with my own life and made me realize
how lucky I am as the 50 meter long floating bathtub we today said goodbye to. Then again no
place has made me feel quite so tired and sick either, but that´s beyond the point.
Saying goodbye was made a hundred times easier by the knowledge that we´re coming back in
just a few months though! Sadly I don´t think it will be with the same officers. Though I am
interested to meet new officers and experience different leadership techniques, so once again it´s
a bitersweet dilema. Anyways, when all the last preperations had been done and all goodbyes
said, we took a buss to miami international airport and by 6 ocklock in the afternoon 43 (1 of our
classmates is staying in the states for a bit) of us where sitting on a plane heading back over the
Atlantic. A short 9 hour trip would soon take us back to the cold nordic place we have just spent
10 weeks sailing away fom. It´s odd realizing what a complicated way we took to reach our
destination. Even odder is thinking about how fun and emotional it was to take that complicated
way. How that way has made us all grow as individuals and as a group.
If I where, for some misterious reason, to choose one cheesy thing which meaning I have truly
learnt this trip it would be the saying that the goal is the journey, not the destination. One could
see all of the harbours we´ve been too as the “destinations” and the sailings as the “journey”.
And the cool thing with this trip hasn´t exactly been that we went to Cape Verde or the
Dominican Republic, it´s that we crossed the Atlantic. That we had swimstops in the carribbean
ocean. That I got to climb up to the top of the mast and see nothing but sea everywhere I looked!
Of course the destinations where fantastical too, but they where only a small fraction of the trip.
A trip that now is over.
Though I´m not per say excited to go back to school and reality, I am excited to go back to
school with this class that I´ve crossed the Atlantic with. We´re the same class that we where 10
weeks ago, but then again not. Creepy stuff.
Lina Exerman SA1922