We didn't do a great job of documenting our trip as it was happening because we were too concerned about getting the "right" shots to post and making everything look insta-perfect. In retrospect we should've just posted what we had to share even more experiences with our friends and families. Hindsight is 20-20 but here's a bunch of the photos from the trip!
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4 weeks ago, Sara and I packed up a lot of what we had, sold the rest and prepared to hit the road. After almost 6 years living in the Bay Area, CA, we chose to pursue a dream 2 years in the making and to have a new experience in life. In that process, we left a lot of things behind that we loved: dozens of close friends, an amazing apartment in one of the only quiet areas in Silicon Valley, our routines and more. We really wanted to spend some extended time with family on the East Coast while exploring new places and also were looking forward to living a much, much cheaper lifestyle than we had in California. We planned to leverage this lower cost of living to get ourselves established in remote work so that we could become permanently location independent and have to make less tradeoffs between family and personal dreams. The plan was that I would pick up some freelance work in app design, product strategy and digital marketing to help pay the bills and cover the basics while also building out a lifestyle business for the future. Sara would explore all remote options to find something that really worked for her as well.
Our outline for the rest of 2018 was that we would travel cross country in a van for 6 weeks, meet up with family in South Carolina for a bit, spend a couple months in Rhode Island with Sara's family, then make our way down to Florida where we would spend the winter months (we are big babies when it comes to weather below 60 degrees). While this plan sounds amazing in theory, it also means that we will be roaming and living without a home base for about 6 months. For a couple people who really do well with routines, structure and comfort, it was going to push us in a lot of ways. Over the course of the last 4 weeks, we've already learned a lot and are making some adjustments along the way. We've traveled to a lot of the places in California that we hadn't gotten to or just wanted to spend more time in. Right now we are in Sedona, which was the spot we were most looking forward to on the trip. It's a completely magical place that we absolutely fell in love with. We have several more stops planned on the way for the next few weeks and we are excited to see what the Universe has in store for us along the way. Here are some things we've learned and some adjustments we'll be making for the second half of the trip.
Those are just the lessons so far, who knows what will happen in the coming weeks and months. But we are doing our best to keep a positive attitude and remember that this is an incredible experience that we're fortunate enough to get a chance to do and determined enough to commit to doing it. Ultimately we'll probably get more out of the challenges that we face than any of the things we'll see along the way. We are realizing that when you make such a dramatic change, you can't expect a completely smooth transition. It will take time to adjust to it and figure out how to make things work for you. We'll try to keep updating things along the way. Thanks for following along! @drivingonsunshine |