Cruisers As Travelers

Vergennes, VT
44 10.17 N 073 15.48 W

I have been thinking for some time about writing a blog post about us (or all cruisers) being nomads.  Yesterday I ran across the use of the word traveler as a synonym.  I looked it up on wikipedia and what I found opened my eyes to a whole body of knowledge new to me.

First, the synonyms:

• Drifter, a person who is continually travelling without a home or job
• Rogue,Vagabond, Vagrant.
• Itinerant, a person who travels from place to place with no fixed home
• Nomad, a person who does not stay long in the same place; a wanderer 
• Perpetual traveler, a traveller/migrant who is not considered a legal resident of any country 
• Tourist, a person who is travelling or visiting a place for pleasure 
• Migrant (or migrant worker)
• Transient, that is what we are called when we stay in a marina. Hotels call us guests but marinas call us transients.
• Here's a complete list:  adventurer, barnstormer, bum, commuter, displaced person, drifter, excursionist, expeditionist, explorer, floater, gadabout, globetrotter, gypsy, haj, hiker, hobo, itinerant,jet-setter, journeyer, junketer, migrant, navigator, nomad, passenger, peddler, pilgrim,rambler, roamer, rover, sailor, seafarer, sightseer, tinker, tourist, tramp, transmigrant, trekker, tripper,trouper, truant, vagabond, vagrant, voyager,wanderer, wayfarer

Wow, what a load of judgmental baggage associated with those words. Some laudatory and some derogatory .  

Everyone is a tourist once in a while.  Few of us wish to be called rogue, vagabond or vagrant.  We met a man once who was a real drifter.  I greatly admired him and wrote a blog about him.  We also met a tinker and wrote a blog about him.  Do you imagine Libby and I to be like the the Rainbow Coalition?  That just makes me giggle.

Second, there are so many kinds of travelers, many of which I never heard of:

• English Travelers
• Scottish travelers, nomadic or itinerant people of Scottish origin 
• New Age travelers, groups of people who often espouse New Age and/or hippie beliefs, and usually travel between music festivals and fairs.  Includes Rainbow Travellers 
• Indigenous Norwegian Travelers, itinerant ethnic minority group in Norway 
• Irish Travellers or Pavees, traditionally nomadic people of Irish origin living predominantly in Ireland and Great Britain 
• Norwegian and Swedish Travelers, a traditionally nomadic people in Scandinavia, sometimes related to the Romani people. 
• Romani people, ethnic group living mostly in Europe, who trace their origins to medieval India.  Commonly called Gypsies in the USA.

So, should we include cruiser as a kind of traveler?  What do cruisers have for similarities and differences compared to travelers?

Similarities

• Travelers travel a lot, mostly with the seasons.
• Travelers have their own language.
• Travelers associate most with fellow travelers (another burdened phrase)
• Travelers often educate their children outside of public schools.
• Travelers they like to squat, or a least to camp for long periods on places they don't own.  (Think of the legal battles over anchoring rights in Florida)

Differences

• (some) Travelers tend to be lawbreakers and anti-social.
• Travelers travel mostly with relatives and tend to marry relatives.
• Travelers live their whole lives as travelers, cruisers tend to do it only for a fraction of their lives.
• Travelers are poor.
• Travelers are the targets of scorn and discrimination.  Unlike other minorities protected by laws, people and governments openly discriminate against travelers.  In the United States, the Georgia Governor's Office of Consumer Affairs issued a press release on March 14, 2007 titled "Irish Travelers Perpetuate a Tradition of Fraud". Imagine if a government said similar things about blacks or Muslims?  Cruisers on the other hand, are widely admired.

So what's the bottom line, are cruisers travelers or not?  At the risk of sounding pedantic, I would say that we are nascent travelers.

What about the joys of being a traveler?  That's what I write about day after day year after year.  However, I do not always make it clear that the joy of continuously moving from one place to another is separate from the joy of sailing or the nice things about the places we visit.   In that sense, we are truly travelers.

p.s. The debate over anchoring rights in Florida is directed at bums who live on boats but who don't travel.  Some land lubbers have a hard time distinguishing bums from cruisers. Although the difference is plain to us, I can understand the ignorance and confusion of the land lubbers.