Posts Tagged: travels

Or: How a full-time family stays connected.

We get this question quite a bit. How do you manage to stay connected to the internet while on the road? The answer is pretty simple on the surface, and then sometimes very complex once you dig in. We figured with so many people (including many of our personal friends) looking into the possibilities of full-time travel, it might help some people to share our tools and process.

Ok. Let’s unpack it.

There’s no blueprint for this time of our lives. We’re all living in this completely unprecedented time in our world history. It’s complicated, with twists and turns and theories and new ideas around every corner. Where did this thing come from and what are our lives going to look like when the dust settles? Sometimes it’s all a little too much.

When I go to bed at night, I often meditate to try to get myself to sleep. It’s nothing fancy, just something to slow my brain down. (I think too much and stew too much, and it causes bouts of insomnia that are really unhealthy for me.) Sometimes I just try to focus my mind on sensory things, like try to be as still as I can and “feel” the nerves in my head to my toes. It’s sounds super weird, I know, but it’s relaxing. Lately though, I’ve been focusing on memories – and this is has been really amazing.

We had such a great time visiting Canada and the Pacific Northwest! In the few short weeks since we moved on, we’re still dreaming of the beautiful bright blue glacier-fed lakes and streams, the mom-and-pop dairy where we spent an evening sampling their delicious gouda, the rocky beach near Seattle where we met some new friends, and even our event-filled trip into downtown Portland.

We have far too much to share than we can really fit into a single blog post, but in the spirit of “done is better than perfect”, we want to be better at getting some of these blog posts actually finished. So with that in mind, this one will be a bit more highlights and photos than hearing us ramble. 🙂

Okay okay. We’re sorry! We know we’re more than a little behind. This journey so far has taken us to so many amazing places, and we’ve been so busy making memories and living life, that we’ve totally blown it on getting this blog some momentum. And for many of our friends and family out there, small instagram posts here and there just aren’t going to cut it.

The truth is, we have so many things that we want to share with you and involve you in, and once you get a little behind, it becomes even more daunting to try to get back up to speed. Nevertheless, that’s the plan here, and hopefully we’ll be back on track soon!

As of writing this, we’ve officially left Southern Montana and Yellowstone National Park. We’re really racking up the miles at this point (over 4,000 so far in about a month!) and it’s becoming more difficult to keep up with posting about our experiences. The reality is that we’re getting to see and do so many things that we just can’t seem to keep up with posting them. I keep saying we’ll get better…but who really knows? Haha.

Our stay in Yellowstone was similar to South Dakota, in that we stayed for nearly two weeks, and mixed a lot of work time with a lot of exploration time. The main difference this time (aside from the location of course) was that my (Harlan) parents met up with us in Gardiner, MT to be with us for the week. And if that wasn’t enough, we had a short visit from some of our absolute best friends, the Waters! It was great having family and friends around to share the experience with us. Community has been the biggest question mark for us on this journey, so having that time about a month in was just what we needed.