Greetings from the Black Hills National Forest in beautiful South Dakota! We’ve had a glorious couple of weeks here, and wanted to share with you all what we’ve been up to. Thus far, we’re learning that we’ve been able to work (remember…NOT vacation!) and still have time for a lot of activities.

We’re still settling into this lifestyle, so blogs and updates might be a bit sporadic at first. That said, we definitely want to share what this journey is allowing us to do, and what it’s doing in us. More to come soon!

As of writing this, we are winding down our first week on the road. It’s been a hectic week – on top of just trying to settle in to this lifestyle, we planned the busiest travel section of our “planned route” right at the very beginning. So far, we’ve gone from DFW to Lubbock to Santa Fe and landed in Denver. Tomorrow morning, we take off for Rapid City, and hopefully things will slow down a bit once we get there.

We’ve learned so much already, and we want to use this space not only to keep you up to date with our family and the places we’re going, but also just how this full-time lifestyle really is, physically, emotionally, financially, etc. So we’ll be using this space to share those kinds of things as well. We hope you’ll hang around and be a part of our journey.

For this installment though, we’d like to just share where and what we’ve been up to this week! Normally we’ll break these out into multiple blogs, but this week has been so hectic, we thought we’d just combine it this time.

AKA: Viva Part One

It’s the number one question that we’ve been asked since we announced several weeks ago our plans to embark on the journey of being full-time travelers. (Well the number one question is probably “are you guys crazy?”…but that’s another story.) We thought we’d fill you in on our first very loose plan for the Summer and Fall.

It should be mentioned that despite the fact we’ve moved out of our house – and into our camper full-time (more on that later) – we haven’t actually left the metroplex quite yet. We’ve had so many people think we’ve already left…but not yet! We’re still here and want to see you and have dinner and talk life for the next couple of months. Baron will be finishing first grade, we’re going on a vacation in early June, then we’re headed out in late June around the 23rd.

Ok so back to it! Like we said last time, we don’t really have a specific agenda to hit all 50 states or visit every national park or anything. Instead, we’ve planned a path from late June to late November that will keep us in the western half of the country…but visiting a ton of great places.

We have a mantra in our family. It’s pretty simple – our life doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s life. We say it all the time, when we’re making trivial decisions that have little impact, and likewise when we’re facing potentially life-altering choices.

A few years ago, we had a big idea to sell all of our things and move across the ocean to England – to serve the local community there and be a part of a culture we’d dreamt about. When the idea came, there was absolutely no doubt it was what we were supposed to do next. There were nerves, of course, but no valid excuses for saying no. About a year ago, in early 2018, we had another big idea.

We discovered that living our lives to the fullest meant not ignoring those big ideas when they came along. It’s with that thought in mind that we want to announce our next big idea with you.

Starting in the summer of 2019, we’re trading in our sticks and bricks for a home on wheels – taking our life, work and belongings on the road as full-time travelers.

Now we know you have questions. Everyone we’ve spoken to about this before now has had a similar line of questioning. So we wanted to take the rest of this post to answer them. (And if you have more…let us know!)