Back to Normal... Collecting Treasures

Boats are often thought to be small and confined and crowded.  By the same line of reasoning, a 200 foot mega-yacht should be spacious, but here's the conundrum...  all boats regardless of size are stuffed with items not normally used or needed but they seem to disappear once aboard.  Even big items come on board and vanish into some cleverly thought out lazzarette or storage space, hidden or stowed out of the way. So on a mega-yacht the 5th jet-ski probably doesn't get used much just as the two person kayak on AURORA rarely gets used. The thing is, there are so many places to stuff stuff on a boat that my tendency is to keep stuffing.  The pack rat in me will always find just the right size space to store whatever it is I believe I may need sometime in my future.  The three weeks before I loaded AURORA on the Gooding's truck, I was forced to lighten the load.  Literally I had to remove extraneous weight and was amazed (and shocked) at items retrieved that I had no recollection of acquiring, including a Veg-a-Matic food chopper in its original 1950's box.  The Goodwill pile and the toss-out pile were huge but I worked through separation anxiety and pretty much emptied AURORA of hundreds of items large and small, light and heavy.  As traumatic as it may have been for me, (they were after all, treasures collected each with its own story attached)  there was one soothing thought... empty spaces can be re-filled.   The above pix demonstrates the efficacy of that factoid...  the first load of treasures bound for their new home on my Old Kentucky Home.