Our Story
A honeymoon in Cozumel. The book a Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett. A move to Key West. A sailboat in Puerto Rico. Hurricanes interrupting a dream. Breast Cancer. A dream reimagined.
Sandbar Stories began long before there was a website, a Parrot Tales podcast, or a plan to sail away.
It began on our honeymoon in Cozumel more than twenty years ago.
We were two kids from the Midwest, sitting on a beach and dreaming about what life might become. On the way to Mexico, Corey had picked up a copy of Jimmy Buffett’s A Salty Piece of Land at the airport.
What seemed like a beach read planted a question that would follow us for the next two decades:
What if life could be lived differently?
A few months later, we chose adventure over certainty.
We packed everything we owned into a U-Haul and drove 2,500 miles from Nebraska to Key West—following a dream all the way to the end of U.S. Highway 1.
2005. Our honeymoon in Cozumel, MX. Where all the scheming started.
Key West, 2005. Corey worked as a mate on a catamaran. The most important skill: pouring beer for guests while under sail.
Over the next two decades, Jimmy Buffett’s music and books became part of the soundtrack of our lives — through road trips, beach vacations, evenings in the kitchen, and family adventures. We joined our first Parrot Head Club in Nebraska, the Corn Republic Parrot Head Club, and traveled to places his music inspired us to visit.
His stories encouraged us to stay curious, say yes more often, and keep choosing experiences over possessions.
Life moved forward.
We built careers. We had two incredible children. The pull toward a more adventure never disappeared. We craved a more aligned life.
In 2017, we decided to take another leap.
We left our jobs, bought a sailboat in Puerto Rico, moved aboard with our young children, and set out to create a different kind of life.
For a brief moment, it felt like the dream was becoming reality.
Then two category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, changed everything.
The dream we had worked so hard to build unraveled almost overnight. We found our way back to shore life wondering what might have been.
Years passed.
The kids grew older. Life became busy. And somewhere beneath the surface, the dream of sailing never completely disappeared.
Puerto Rico, 2017. The four of us, a sailboat, and a dream.
Puerto Rico, 2025. The return trip that reignited a dream.
In early 2025, we returned to Puerto Rico for the first time since the hurricanes had ended that chapter of our lives.
The island brought back memories of both heartbreak and possibility. As we revisited familiar waters and the places that once held our dreams, something unexpected happened.
The pull came back.
Not exactly as it was before, but stronger and clearer than it had been in years.
We began planning again.
Then, just one week after returning home from Puerto Rico, cancer entered our lives.
Nikki’s breast cancer diagnosis became one of those moments that divides life into a before and after. It reminded us that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed and that the things we say we’ll do “someday” deserve our attention today.
During this difficult season for our family, Corey turned to a familiar source of comfort and inspiration. Hoping to bring a little adventure, optimism, and escape into our evenings, he began reading A Salty Piece of Land to our daughter Evelyn at bedtime.
Twenty years after first reading it on a beach in Cozumel, the story felt different.
This time it wasn’t inspiring another adventure.
It was helping explain a lifetime of them.
First day of chemo infusions May 29, 2025.
Those evenings became the spark that eventually led to Sandbar Stories.
We began thinking about all the people, places, friendships, concerts, adventures, and life-changing moments that Jimmy Buffett’s work had helped create — not just in our lives, but in the lives of countless others.
We realized Jimmy’s greatest legacy wasn’t the music itself.
It was what the music made possible.
The adventures it inspired.
The friendships it created.
The Parrot Head community that grew around it.
And the stories people carried home with them.
We wanted to help preserve those stories.
Last day of infusions April 29, 2026. Nikki got to ring the bell!!
December 2025. A sailing trip from Oahu to Kauai helped answer the question we’d been asking for years. Was the sailing dream alive still?
In 2027, our family will move aboard a sailboat and set out once again.
This time, we’re going with a mission: to explore, document, and share the stories that have grown from all the places made up and true that Jimmy sang and wrote about.
Through Sandbar Stories and our podcast, Parrot Tales, we’ll collect stories from the people we meet, the places we visit, and those whose lives have been shaped by Jimmy’s music, stories, and way of looking at the world.
We’ll follow some of the places he wrote about. We’ll discover others we never knew existed. And along the way, we’ll listen.
Because after all these years, we’ve realized this isn’t simply our sailing story.
It’s a story about what one person’s words and music set in motion in millions of lives.
And those stories belong to the people who lived them.