When Paul and I had been dating for about six months, we took our first trip together. We flew up to Seattle for a long weekend to look at a boat Paul wanted to buy. It wasn’t just any boat. It was the boat of his dreams. It was an old wooden boat– a coastal patrol boat built in 1943  by the Coast Guard to patrol Puget Sound during  World War II. It was still in pretty good condition and Paul really, really wanted it. He had spent months surfing the Internet (an addiction he claims he has since been cured of) for just the right boat to fit our family and our life style. He’s a dreamer, what can I say? I think he knew in his heart that it was just a fantasy, but he still wanted to check it out and have a romantic getaway in the process. The boat, the “Marylee” was anchored in Port Orchard and was fabulous. We spent hours on board, taking photos and drawing up plans to remodel it. It needed some work, but not a lot, and the price was within reason. We told the broker we needed time to think it over and we spent the rest of the weekend sightseeing, getting closer and falling more in love than ever. We just knew we had to get married, so in the airport waiting to board our flight home, we made a list of all of things we needed  to do to blend our families and be together. Paul pulled out some graph paper (remember he’s an engineer) and drew a line down the middle. On one side he wrote “Paul’s House” for him and on the other, “Carol’s House” for me. Then he listed numerically all the steps we had to take to get my house ready to sell and  the construction plan to remodel and add an addition to his house so that we could all live together.  It was very long and detailed and we spent hours refining and tweaking it.  It outlined our goals for the future which included the business we were starting. It was our guide and schedule for the next few months that we used to start our future together. I still have it. As for the old wooden boat? Well, that  didn’t even make the list. The moral of the story: Sometimes you need to go look for an old wooden boat together to discover that you don’t really need an old wooden boat … you just need each other.