We get lots of questions about our choice of name. So here’s the story. Several years ago, when Sarah was about four, she asked Deb if she had to have her desert right away, or could she wait until after she finished something (who knows what). Deb said "it’s now or never". Having heard that expression many times from both of us, Sarah said: "That doesn’t really make sense. If I don’t have it now, it’s not like I’m never going to have desert again. It’s just that if I don’t eat it now, I’m not going to get it this time. So it really should be ‘now or not’, not ‘now or never’." The expression stuck, and we’ve used it in our family ever since.

As our idea for this trip began to migrate from a dream toward a plan, we always said we couldn’t imaging pulling Danny out of high school for the year. So as time kept passing, we identified this year as the last year we could really do it – at least until the kids were grown and out of the house. Thus, "Now or Not" seemed a fitting name.

We did have a bit of argument over the spelling. For a while we were headed toward "Now or Knot", playing on the nautical spelling. I nice pun, but we were afraid that in ports where English is not spoken, we would have a tough enough time getting the spelling of our boat across. Then we landed on "Nowernot", with an "e". This is how it sounds, so might have been easier for foreign speakers. More importantly, if you break your tones a bit differently, it sounds like the answer we got from our kids to the assertion that we were actually going to take this trip – "NO WE’RE NOT!!"

In the end, we went with the one word spelling of the original.