I bought a used boat in some state of neglect, fixed it up and lived on it. We sailed from Brighton, England cross-channel to France and back a few times, then across the bay of Biscay, down the coasts of Spain and Portugal and past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, with a short hop to Ceuta, which is geographically in Africa but somehow part of the EU. Then we sailed around in the Med for a couple years before deciding it was time to do something else.