In 2012, Karen Reilly and her husband Stan sold their home, stepped aboard a 58-foot Hatteras Long Range Cruiser named Masterplan, and began moving. They did not stop for 12 years. By the time the voyage ended, they had passed through 63 countries by boat, ship, train, plane, and car — and Reilly had a trilogy to write.
The Masterplan Trilogy chronicles that journey across three volumes. The first two are available now on Amazon. The third remains forthcoming, no date yet confirmed.
“We weren’t trying to tick destinations off a list,” Reilly says. “We were trying to see what would happen if we actually lived inside the dream we’d been talking about for years.”
Volume I covers 2012 to 2014 — the years of becoming liveaboards. Masterplan weighs 130,000 pounds and learning to call it home required adjustments that the book does not smooth over. The chaos is part of the record: systems that failed, routines that had to be invented, the particular disorientation of a life that no longer has a fixed address. Reilly writes it as it happened.
Volume II opens in 2015 and runs through 2019. By this point the couple had found their rhythm. Masterplan became a home base rather than a vehicle, with cruise ships, ferries, trains, and rental cars carrying the Reillys outward through Europe, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. The frame widens considerably. So does the mileage.
What holds both volumes together is the register. Reilly does not write about travel as a sequence of highlights. Breathtaking views sit in the same chapters as laundry days and missed ferries and the ongoing search for gluten-free meals. The adventure is real. So is the effort required to sustain it across a decade and more. The result reads like sitting beside someone in a pilothouse at dusk — honest company rather than a guided tour.
That honesty gives the books a specific readership. Karen and Stan made this journey in their 60s and 70s, which places Masterplan squarely in the growing literature of second-act reinvention — people who waited until the career and the child-raising were behind them and then asked what came next. The books answer that question without offering a checklist. They offer evidence instead.
“I wanted our grandchildren — and anyone picking up these books — to know that it’s never too late to choose adventure,” Reilly says.
Volumes I and II of the Masterplan Trilogy are available now on Amazon.
