So…my first official blog post.  Eeeeek! Where to start? I guess the beginning would be a good starting point.  🙂 As I’ve been telling people that I’m leaving, they’ve been shocked by the plan and most of them have asked how my husband and I decided to do this trip.  Our decision seemed to be completely random and come out of the blue.  I’m sure it also seemed spontaneous, but truth be told, I’m not a spontaneous person at all.  I am a hardcore organizer and obsessive compulsive planner (a self-proclaimed OCP).

However, it seems like I’ve been planning out every day of my life for years trying to make time for everything.  Frankly, I’m burned out.  Plus, after living in California for over 5 years, the traffic and cost of living finally got to us.  We were ready to leave California but didn’t know exactly where we should move.  Our options were limitless since we weren’t moving for specific jobs or to be with family, so we starting looking into places that sounded interesting.

As we were researching these places, Austin, TX kept coming up as being a great place to live.  Everyone was telling us how amazing it is and that it’s the place we should live next.  So after Christmas last year, we visited Austin for a week.

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  Downtown Austin

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  At Downtown Austin

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  Lake Travis (Austin)

We also drove over to San Antonio while we were in Austin and checked out the River Walk.

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  River Walk (San Antonio)

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  River Walk (San Antonio)

But while we enjoyed Austin and San Antonio, we knew they weren’t the right places for us.  Back to the drawing board…

Some other places that intrigued us were Oregon, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, etc.  But how would we see them all? We now knew that a place just sounding “interesting” or “nice” wasn’t going to mean that it was the right place for us.  We decided that we needed to see our options in person, and my husband thought a road trip with an RV would be fun.

When he first mentioned a road trip though, I thought to myself “Yeah right!” and scoffed at him.  I automatically thought we were too young (we weren’t retired).  Plus, how were we going to take time off work and be able to see everything we wanted to see? Then, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  Why did we have to be retired to do a cross country road trip with an RV? Suddenly, a light bulb went off, and I thought, why not take a month off between leaving California and moving to a new state?

The idea of traveling the country before we moved somewhere else was exciting! We started planning the road trip and mapping out our stops.  Long story short, a couple of states turned into nearly the entire country and 1 month turned into 6 months (possibly more).  If we were going to do it, we might as well do ALL of it and go big! So I left my job, Justin ended up being laid off and we sold most of our belongings (including cars, motorcycles and furniture).  We are getting a truck and trailer and are heading out on the open road with no timeline.

Other than planning out the main places we want to see and mapping out a route, we haven’t planned out any other particulars of the trip.  We have no idea how long we’ll be staying at each place or where we’ll be staying while we’re there.  And for the first time in my life, I’m thrilled to not have to plan out every detail of every day.  I’m ready for an adventure!