All Aboard!

Our love of travel and boating came together in our voyage on America's Great Loop. We hope our web site will help you share that adventure as you read Coming Full Circle. You can read excerpts, view pictures by chapter, link to related sites, share your stories and pictures, and contact us with questions and comments. WELCOME ABOARD!




Coming Full Circle, a Story About Cruising the Great Loop

About Coming Full Circle: A Voyage on America's Great Loop

Cruising America's Great Loop is one of the premier boating adventures in North America. We spent four summers on our Nordhavn 35 Gulf Cart completing the trip, logging over 7,000 miles along the way. We survived two floods, weathered a tropical storm and outran a waterspout. Our route took us south from our homeport of Naples around Florida's southern tip, then up the east coast, through Lake Champlain into Canada, across the Great Lakes, through Chicago and back to the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. We took many side trips along the way.

Coming Full Circle: A Voyage on America's Great Loop tells the story of our adventures along America's waterways. It is a celebration of live-aboard boating and cruising. It is a commentary on the places we visited. It describes the joys and challenges of the journey with a sense of humor. It tells of hauling laundry through marinas, picking blueberries in Canada, hiking for groceries, watching gorgeous sunsets in isolated anchorages, arriving at a new port in time for a local festival. It tells about the community of boaters on the Loop, of sharing long water crossings with other boats and celebrating with them afterwards. It is a story of discovery, new places, new friends, new foods and new ideas.

If you have boated the Great Loop, this book will bring back memories. If you are thinking about boating the Great Loop, this book will get your adrenalin pumping. If you haven't considered the trip before, after reading this book you may add boating the Great Loop to your bucket list.

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"Come aboard, and welcome to Gulf Cart". This greeting will be your start of an amazing adventure with Bruce and Susan Armstrong as they take you on an armchair tour of their four years cruising the Great Loop. Through their eyes, you will view the greatness of our country as seen from the water, the backyard of America. If you are planning on starting your own adventure of Looping, you are about to get pumped up.
—Tom Conrad, AGLCA Member and Skipper Bob Award Winner

As a non-boater, I did not expect to be much interested, but to my surprise I found myself truly enjoying the adventures of the Armstrongs cruising the Loop. A definite must-read for both boaters and non-boaters!
—Carl L. Steinhouse, author of five books about Heroes of the Holocaust