I always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. I’d ride my big wheel around saving the universe in a beat up old blue plastic helmet with antennae, visor down, and the words “Lunar Patrol” printed across the front. I’d wear cheap plastic sunglasses with the lenses punched out and tell people I had x-ray vision. I loved Mork & Mindy. (Na-Nu Na-Nu.) You know, pretty standard stuff for an upbringing in the late seventies and early eighties in San Francisco.

Well, I lost that helmet long ago and Mork and Mindy married in the final episode of their show back in 1982. So it’s ironic (nostalgic? sad?) that I feel more like an astronaut than ever before.

I know, I know…that sounds pretty bizarre to most of you out there reading. (It’s a bit bizarre to me, too.) But it’s true.

When I think back to June 2011, just eleven short months ago, I remember getting ready for a trip around the world with my wife and kids. It was a very cool time for us; we were excited and nervous and anxious and thrilled. Sort of like we were sitting in a spaceship together, hurriedly preparing for blast off and new experiences and encounters in outer space. Sort of like we were…well, astronauts.

And our first few months on the road were exhilarating and exhausting and wonderful, just as I imagine that first flight to the moon was for Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong aboard Apollo 11 all those years ago.

We didn’t land on the moon, of course, but I think it is pretty fair to say that we entered into a lazy orbit after around three months of travel (somewhere around the Croatian island of Brac) and stayed up there in space for the remainder of our trip. (I thought I'd provide a few old photos in an effort to demonstrate our time in the heavens.) We took life as it came, easily, and passed time and new experience together without interruption or distraction. It was beautiful up there in the cosmos, simple.

But, just as Neil and Buzz had to pilot Apollo 11 back home after taking a few small steps (amongst other things), so too did we have to come back out of orbit and down into the real world. Work, responsibility, taxes, housing, school…everything loomed large as we peered back down at earth. It seemed simple from up there, though; the world looked peaceful and beautiful and easy. And we truly believed that we were on to something very special after we accepted a job running a restaurant group in the Napa Valley and moved to St. Helena.

But, alas, spaceships and space…people can take quite a beating as they re-enter earth’s atmosphere. In fact, according to many Hollywood sci-fi flicks (my primary source for astronaut-related knowledge), that re-entry is perhaps the most difficult part of space travel.

It certainly has been for us.

The restaurant gig has failed (think Apollo 13). We remain close friends with the proprietors and are truly happy to have kept the longstanding relationship, but the business arrangements we made just didn’t work out. And while the outcome is a disappointment, for sure, let’s just say that there was no future in it for us and that we are glad to have realized that sooner than later. In the words of a close friend, “if you’re going to fail at something, fail quickly.” Very true.

(Note that I don’t think of all this as a “failure” in the negative sense, I actually think that we took a shot at something new and exciting and that it ultimately didn’t work out…not the end of the world and I’m proud that we took the shot and gave it an honest try.)

So once again we find ourselves adrift, only this time not up in orbit. Instead, we are floating around our banged-up spacecraft in the middle of an ocean, debris scattered about, having missed our intended landing zone by a few thousand miles. We have a life-raft and plenty of provisions, though, so all is well. But we are indeed adrift, and we need to figure out which way to paddle to get home safely.

I’m very confident that we’ll make it—we’re still a happy and mellow crew—but none of us has had to paddle hard for some time now, and we need to get moving (the raft and provisions won’t last forever, after all). We know that search and rescue professionals are looking for us right now…but we also know that sitting idle is not an option.

And so we paddle, my friends. Always forward. Always searching.

And so we paddle.