Hi! My name is Diana, and in 14 days, my family and I will embark on the adventure we have been dreaming of for several years. We’re leaving everything we know to wander somewhat aimlessly around the world in search of, well, nothing really. We’re going to spend the next 12 months traveling with a goal of visiting every continent and swimming in every ocean. We want to meet new people, eat lots of different foods, experience other cultures, and find our own place in this world. It feels surreal to realize that we are actually doing this. I mean, who really does this kind of thing? We have sold our house, quit our jobs, and booked our one way flights out of the country. This is crazy!

Perhaps you think we’re brave, this trip we’re taking sounds amazing and while you may not ever do it yourself, you are really excited for us. Or perhaps you may be one of the ones who say ‘Wow. That’s neat’ and then wonder if we’ve lost our minds. It’s okay. Really. We love you no matter how you feel about it. We know that this sounds impulsive and irrational, and we don’t really expect anyone to understand (but we’d love it if you did).

Our dream began in early 2019. Brian and I were hiking a fire watch trail near Asheville, North Carolina while we were enjoying a romantic getaway. We were talking about how we wanted to be able to travel to so many places, but with our jobs and commitments, we would never have enough time to see them all. We had a beautiful home on 6.5 rolling acres, two very good but demanding jobs, and more responsibility than we cared to carry. Travel sounded great, but between our work, bills, and the expense of travelling, it just wasn’t practical. Before this conversation, both of us had been struggling with these thoughts, but we each just assumed that the other was content. Come to find out, we were both tired of the rat race, and neither one of us could see the point in continuing it. We talked about leaving it all behind, buying a conversion van to fix up, and then we’d take Henry with us and travel the country, seeing all of those things we had only dreamed of.

Over the next few weeks, the conversation grew more and more serious to the point of actually watching videos on converting vehicles for this kind of travel. We learned that there were a lot of people who did do this – people just like us who weren’t sitting on a giant nest egg, people with little bitty kids, and people who weren’t weird smelling hitchhikers were making this work for them. Many of them had digital/remote jobs, and because neither of our jobs would ever support remote work, we began researching our options with that too.

A few months into it, we talked to Henry about the idea. He handled it in the easy-going way he handles most things. He was game for the idea, but he wasn’t exactly thrilled. I don’t think he thought we were serious. We asked him to keep the idea quiet outside of the three of us, but at home, we all began picking out places we wanted to see. I don’t really remember when or how the trip morphed from a conversion van in the US to backpacking the world, but we decided that we could see more and do more if we were willing to let go of a few more conveniences and travel further away. By Christmas of 2019, we bought the largest world map we could find and began pinning our wish-list destinations!

Over the next year, we began preparing by researching and paring down our belongings. We needed to replace Brian’s truck, but we decided to hold onto it a bit longer so we wouldn’t have to spend the extra money. We began to really question new purchases and tried hard to hold ourselves to a tighter budget than we’d had. We began following different blogs and watching videos to learn as much as we could. We started changing our credit card strategy to better take advantage of bonus points and rewards so we could have them available to help fund our trip. And we set a tentative date of June 1st, 2021 for our departure.

In 2020 when COVID hit, we expected to have to push off our trip for a few months to a year. We were really disappointed, but we knew eventually that it would pass and we’d be able to go out. We questioned what travel would even look like when all was said and done, but we still had plans to go. Brian and I were both working in ‘essential’ businesses and in positions that could not work remotely, so the pandemic only meant more hours and more work for both of us. Friends would post about their abundant newly found family time, but we barely saw one other or our son for months. Because of that, 2020 took a harder toll on our family than we’d expected and by the spring of 2021, we weren’t even sure we could/would go. Brian and I were struggling, and we didn’t know how to get our marriage back on track. It looked like the dream was dead.

After much debate, we decided that this trip could be our one shot to start over, to put our family first again, and to try to heal and refresh our relationship. We decided that there would never be a convenient time, and if we wanted this, we would just have to make it happen. We needed a fresh start, a second chance at the life we had dreamed of. So we put our house on the market, and when we had a contract on it, we set a tentative departure date of mid August.

Several weeks later, we’re living in a one bedroom apartment that our friend was willing to rent to us for the short term, and as of Friday, we will officially be unemployed. We have a pile of supplies in our tiny living room that we need to organize into our three brand new backpacks, a freezer full of food we are still working to eat down so it doesn’t go to waste, and a storage unit packed to the brim with everything else we own. Life has changed significantly over the past 2 years since the inception of the dream. Its terrifying but oh so exciting. It’s uncomfortable, but refreshing at the same time. Of course, isn’t that what chasing a dream is supposed to feel like? There will always be a good reason to put it off for another time, but tomorrow isn’t promised, and we can’t keep putting off life waiting for everything to be perfect. It’s time for us to chase our dream. It may be a wonderful adventure or it might be a terrible mistake, but either way, we’re going to experience it together.

What about your dreams? Are you ready to chase them? If not now… when?