MS doesn’t get to cancel family trips.
The Archies go anyway.
My dad, Tim Archie, was diagnosed with primary progressive MS in January 1999. The next day he kept his promise and took me, nearly three, to New York. He crouched behind me on the curb outside the Palace Hotel while I raised my hand for my first taxi. That was the rule for the next twenty years.
We made it work.
Dinner stayed at the kitchen table with the candles lit, and getting him there took sixteen stairs, one foot at a time. When he moved to a room downstairs, dinner moved with him. No policy or announcement. It was just what we did to keep our normal.
When something went wrong, he cracked a joke, so our family motto became:
We Crack Ourselves Up.
Read or listen to “We Crack Ourselves Up” (opens in a new tab)
Every July, we still went.
Dinner at Islesford Dock is fifteen minutes from shore by boat. The tide there moves ten feet or more, and the gangplank moves with it. Getting Dad aboard meant reading the tide, the gangplank and the boat, then a count.
One, two, three, lift.
We got good at it, and we kept going.
In his last few months, I told Dad about an idea: take our family’s MS fundraising off the bike and onto the water. It wasn’t a plan yet. He died on March 19, 2018, before it was.
He’d started me on the water, too. At his suggestion I went to my first sailing camp at Washington Sailing School on the Potomac in 2007, capsized a Sunfish the first morning, and climbed back in. I went on to teach there for ten years.
And in 2017, our family started riding as Team Archie. We’ve raised over $380,000 for the National MS Society since.
Now we say go to you.
People living with MS and their families will sail as real crew, port to port around the world, and we film along the way. Team Archie is our cycling chapter. Expedition MS is the sailing one, and its own nonprofit.
Where you come in.
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Come sailing
People living with MS, their families and experienced sailors crew together. No sailing experience needed.
Sail with us -
Tell us your story
If MS is part of your life, Tim’s story is one of many. We’d like to hear yours.
Share your story -
Help make it happen
Boats, ports, film, funding or an introduction. Tell us what you can bring.
Partner with us
The long versions
- You Can’t Be Sad in a Mexican Restaurant (opens in a new tab)Twenty years of primary progressive MS, the way we lived it.
- We Crack Ourselves Up (opens in a new tab)Growing up with Dad, written in 2015. Read or listen.
- The Ring (opens in a new tab)The one thing of his I wear every day.
- All the Away We Go essays (opens in a new tab)Including how the idea came back.