What is the Great Loop?
It's a circumnavigation of the eastern part of the US by waterways. It's approximately 6000 miles (plus many opportunities for side trips). It's typically followed seasonally - winter in the warmth of Florida, spring traveling up the ICW, summer in NY and Canada and then fall heading down the riverways of the mid west. Many loopers complete it in a year.
Here's the official map as published by the American Great Loop Cruisers Association:
Some of our key Great Loop posts:
- Our Great Loop Plans
- Great Loop Boat Specifications
- Shopping for and Buying Our Boat
- Why we Selected our Bayliner 4788 for the Great Loop
- Tour of our Bayliner 4788 — Y-Not
- Sloopers Slow Looping: Eight Years on the American Great Loop and More to Go!
Our Interactive Great Loop Map
We set off on the Great Loop in April 2017, intending to completed it in 2-3 years, taking it slowly. When it gets too cold to boat, we planned to put the boat in storage and return to our RV-home waiting for us in the warmth of the south.
Reality has been - we just love living aboard & cruising in our boat, and are finding even a slower pace of travel is suiting us better. And of course, in 2020 the pandemic put us on pause for a few years having us turn back to a favorite side trip - Sanford, FL.
We officially returned to active looping April 2024, picking up where we left off in Charleston, SC later that summer.
We find we love actively cruising for a few weeks, anchoring out along the way. We're also frequently taking as many side trips as we can, and stopping in places many faster paced Loopers skip. And then finding our next cool coastal city with a marina with easy access to stuff and a great monthly rate.
Click on the area of the map you're interested in to start browsing our travelogues & videos about each stop (individual posts also at the bottom of this page).
The map & routing above is provided by the WordPress plug-in Nomad World Map that utilizes all of our blog travelogue entries.
Retrospective: 2019 – Nomadic Balance
After so many lessons on the road over the years, I’d say 2019 was a year of tremendous balance. It wasn’t without obstacles. But we navigated them without overwhelm thanks to the skillsets we had built already. We focused on the important things. We evacuated, again, for another major hurricane – but it thankfully turned […]
Retrospective: 2018 – Correcting the Course
Our first year of boat ownership was definitely not without a huge learning curve. And despite the challenges, we were loving it. At the beginning of 2018, it was time to get back to our intentions – continue our Great Loop and integrate in part of the year with RVing. Fresh out of the boat […]
Retrospective: 2017 – Gratitude & Humility
After 10 years on the road in various RVs, we decided to switch it up by getting a boat in 2017. While we had established ourselves as ‘experts’ in the RV space, we were now Strangers in a Strange Land.. err.. water. We were complete newbies having gone from an inflatable kayak to a 47′ […]
New Internet Video, Blog Comments Are Back & General Updates
Last month, our host of this site since we started it way back in 2007 – DreamHost – moved us from our legacy server to a new one. The website went completely down in the process, but thankfully they were able to restore the content and most of the formatting. However, for reasons unexplained – […]
A Nomadic Fleet: Vintage Bus, Camper Van and Boat
As we approach our 16th year on the road, it seems we have built a nomadic fleet. And we’ve received a lot of questions on how it’s working out to manage a boat, a van and a bus. The quick answer – far better than we ever imagined. Before we left Zephyr behind in Arizona […]
Happy 5th Birthday, Y-Not! Boat Project Updates – Flooring, Composting Toilet & More
This week marks five years since we took ownership of Y-Not, our 1999 Bayliner 4788. Crazy how time flies! And what an incredible journey into the cruising lifestyle it has been! It’s been a few years since we’ve done a major update on boat improvements, projects and modifications we’ve done – so we thought this […]
Back to the Boat in Sanford, Wrapping up 6+ Months of Van Travel
We have arrived back to Sanford to Y-Not, and are getting settled back into boat life.. and boat projects! So before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s do a little re-cap of our last month of our extended van meandering. First, the video version: Xscapers New Years Eve & Bash We ended out […]
Boat Upgrade: Inflatable Hot Tub on a Bayliner 4788
Before we bought our boat Y-Not in 2017, we of course deeply researched the Bayliner 4788 model. And we were very intrigued when we found posts from a few owners who had added hot tubs to the flybridge successfully. We love getting in hot water – would we be able to someday add a hot […]
Southbound Cruise on the St. Johns River: Return to Sanford (Dolphin Quest, Part 2)
Thanks for joining along in our return to travelogues! Where we last left you, we had just arrived to Jacksonville after a marvelous cruise down the St. Johns River from our pandemic home base of Sanford. It’s our first extended trip in over a year, and we’re on a mission to find dolphins! So, let’s […]
RV Hacks: Travel Photo Library Management Tip and a New Book!
Once you’ve been on the road a while, you inevitably start to accumulate a ton of photos. And not all of them blog worthy shots. In fact, some of them might be downright awful. Like those shots of inside your pocket, blurry attempts at capturing a rainbow, or hundreds of photos trying to capture your […]
Back to Cruising – Dolphin Quest! St Johns River Northbound from Sanford to Jacksonville
We’ve been semi-stationary aboard our boat since March of 2020, making Sanford Florida our pandemic home base. We haven’t been completely stationary though. We’ve been thoroughly enjoying many camping excursions in our van (we’ve managed to visit every state park with camping in Central Florida!). And we’ve been taking the boat out anchoring down the […]
Our New eBikes Have Arrived: e-Joe EPIK Swan Folding Electric Bikes
We posted that we were searching for new eBikes back in October 2020. The e-Joe EPIK SEs we acquired in 2015 had reached the end of their useful life – and we were itching for something that would get us back out riding. We shared what we were looking for in new eBikes – and the […]
