We quit our jobs, sold our house and hit the road for a year with our five-year-old. We are either having the adventure of a lifetime or throwing away good jobs and a nice house only to live in a tin can! We will tell our story and you can be the judge!
In many ways we were living the American dream. We married relatively late in life after having both invested many years in the rat race. Our time was largely engulfed by commuting and work, punctuated by occasional travel (which we both loved). We were lucky enough to be blessed with a beautiful, healthy baby girl and we continued working with daycare incorporated into the mix. However, when Kay’s father passed, it inspired us to revisit our family goals and reconsider how we wanted to spend our days and years going forward. We wanted more time together, more time with our daughter. We wanted more fun, more adventure, more freedom. So . . . we decided to reboot our life, starting with a year-long trip around the United States to see our National Parks, then settling into a more family-oriented life in a place that will maximize our quality of life.
Step by step, over a two-year period, we turned our vision into reality. First, we created a detailed financial plan, and determined that we could leave our jobs. Kay left her job first as we began the slow unwind of our current life.
Then we created our one-year trip itinerary, which detailed the entire 400-day trip, complete with desired RV campsites, travel distance and time between stops, and key local sightseeing highlights not to be missed at each spot. It was quite a challenge to hit all the National Parks and nearly all 48 contiguous states on a route that minimized extreme weather and did it all in 13 months!
Next on the list was determining what type of RV would become our family home for a 12-month continuous period. What an odyssey that was for people who had never set foot in an RV. After much searching, we ended up with a 30-foot Airstream (see our post on the subject) and we love it – it was the best choice for our family. Once we purchased the travel trailer, we had to buy a vehicle that could tow it away from the RV dealer’s lot! Several weeks later we had traded in our navy-blue sedan for a fire-engine red F-250 diesel truck. We were getting dangerously close to uprooting our life and living our dream.
The next step was choosing our launch date. Since we had a preschooler who was rapidly approaching kindergarten age, we knew that we should go sooner, rather than later. We originally discussed June 2017. It was optimal as Elle was four-years old and the trip would be completed before she started kindergarten. We wrestled with the decision, then finally decided we would give ourselves a Thanksgiving deadline. Thanksgiving came and we decided we weren’t quite ready. We put our trip off a year. Our family and friends assumed we were never really going… it was just a dream that we were going to spend forever talking about.
The following year we had saved a little more, we found reasonably affordable private health insurance and houses seemed to be selling in our area, so we took a deep breath and gave ourselves the green light. The day after Thanksgiving we called the realtor and put our house on the market… and it sold three days later. We could not believe it. We took this as a sign – this trip was meant to be! Plus, we had nowhere to live so… this was it… the trip was happening!
There was just one thing left to do. Kay had already stopped working, but in April 2018 DT followed suit and on May 31st, after attending Elle’s preschool graduation, we pulled out of her preschool parking lot in our big red truck towing our silver Airstream and that was the official launch of our BIG ADVENTURE!
