Lee Wachtstetter, or "Mama Lee," knows there is nothing ordinary about her life. Around eight years ago, she made a bizarre decision to give up everything and permanently live on a cruise ship. Since then, she hasn't looked back.
Mama Lee lives on the Crystal Serenity, a massive cruise ship that travels all over the world. She and her husband went on over 100 cruises together. The day before he died, he told her one final thing.
“The last thing he ever said to me was — this was the day before he died – ‘Don’t you quit cruising,'" she told CBS. Mama Lee listened. There are a lot of perks to this unique lifestyle, and she knows it.
“I don’t have to clean [the] house. I don’t have to shop, I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to do anything. I do what I want, when I want, if I want,” she said.
Mama Lee is now a great-grandmother, and even her great-grandkids are growing up. She decided she would sell her home, car, and belongings in Florida and live her best life.
And how often does she talk to her family back home? “Oh, I talk to them every day. I’ll talk to them twice a day if it means I don’t have to be there!”
Wachtstetter and her late husband, Mason, took nearly 100 cruises together before he died in 1997. “I started frequent cruising. But I got very, very tired of packing and unpacking. So I said, there’s got to be a better way to do this.”
Mama Lee sold her house in Florida, along with her car and most of her belongings, and never looked back.
“I dance every single day at 5:15, 7 days a week,” she said. “I think I live a fairy-tale existence. It’s not a real life, I realize that. Not everybody does this. But a lot of people could.”
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