Some homes have a foundation, four walls, a roof, a yard, a driveway, a porch. Others have the gentle roll of waves beneath them, open sky behind portholes and blue water beyond a fiberglass hull.

Home is where one makes it, and for the past year, Roger Lee made his home on the Pamlico River; his sailboat, Warrior for Life, moored just off the Washington waterfront. Flying a British flag, Warrior for Life, along with Lee and his two cats and shipmates, Mogs and Pim, became a part of the waterfront vista, and Washington life, in general, in that year.

Washington, and its people, became an important part of Lee’s life, too.

Lee was preparing for the journey home last week, a months-long journey that will take him across the Atlantic Ocean, to Bermuda, the Azores, and on to Portugal, to the riverside town from which he set sail four years ago.

“I’ve been busy, turning it back into a sailboat from a houseboat,” Lee said, gesturing into the cabin of Warrior for Life. It had the look of organized chaos; dismantled in the first stage of transformation from a long-term mooring to a seaworthy vessel.

Lee’s sailing journey began many years ago. At various points a newspaperman, an academic, head of the photography department at University of Cumbria, he’d been a sailor most of his life, even living aboard at certain points. But it was when he retired that he decided to take the trip of a lifetime: sailing to the United States to visit his son’s family in Cary.

“I wanted to go back to sailing. It’d been niggling me the past few years,” Lee said.

He recalled the Skype conversation in which he told his grandchildren he was coming to visit them in North Carolina.

“’Well, it’s going to take three years,’ I told them. … ‘I’ll be sailing, and you sail at walking speed.’ That took a little bit to wrap their heads around,” he laughed.

He purchased Warrior for Life in Portugal and from Portimao, he sailed to Morocco in December 2012. Lee spent a year in the Canary Islands, visiting most of the islands in the archipelago off the coast of Africa. He crossed the Atlantic to Grenada, then sailed through the Caribbean to the Dominican Republic, where he was able to get an American visa, before making landfall in the U.S. in West Palm Beach, Florida, two years ago. There he was met by a fellow boater who brought him a chocolate cake and the greeting, “Welcome to America.”

“I thought, ‘Wow, what an omen.’ And that’s been my experience since, culminating in Little Washington,” Lee said.

By April 2015, Lee was making his way up the East Coast to meet his son and family in Chocowinity — they were camping there— and it was here that he decided to stay.

“I came to Little Washington because it was the closest point of contact to Cary,” Lee said.

In between visits from his family, in which they explored the river, and short sailing trips, in which he explored eastern North Carolina — “I had to go through the Dismal Swamp, and it’s not dismal at all,” he laughed — Lee called Washington home for a year. In that year, he experienced much more than a safe harbor and a quaint town, he said.

“It’s the people — so open and so generous. Very, very human; very friendly. I don’t know how to explain it but they made me — almost a complete stranger — feel at home,” Lee said.

Strangers stopping to ask if he needed a ride anywhere; waterfront neighbors inviting him for dinner or dropping by with hot soup on a cold day. When Lee’s son, Ben, fell ill, one new friend drove him to Cary, and for the two months he was there, the town dockmasters looked after Warrior for Life. Lee found a friend in Charles, a recent widower, who would squire him around on his errands.

“He drives me around and we talk about life and the universe, the way old men do,” Lee said.

Lee and his crew acclimated to Washington: the tabby, Pim, making friends with neighborhood cats and Mogs sticking closer to home, though he did appreciate a stroll along the waterfront, Lee said.

“He’s become a bit of a talking point here. We go for walks in the morning on the boardwalk — he follows me like a dog,” Lee said.

Another trans-Atlantic sail awaits the three shipmates: 620 miles to Bermuda; 1,850 miles to the Azores; a final leg of 800 miles to Portugal. Lee said, at 72 years old, it’s unlikely he’ll sail this way again, but he had a parting to all those who’ve befriended and helped him over the past year, a message of gratitude and appreciation.

“What I want to say from my heart, is what a wonderful place Little Washington is,” Lee said. “I am very sad to be leaving. … It’s become a home away from home for me.”