T-Minus Six Months and Counting

In between the scout campouts, and soccer tryouts, and baseball practices, and the mounting chore list of a typical weekend, I surprisingly found a moment to look at my calendar to pencil in a few more “have tos.”  Like a lightning bolt, it occurred to me that we are less than six months away from beginning a trip that we have been planning for six years.   In less than six months, there will be no soccer or baseball or chore list, as we set out for life on the road.  I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am giddy at the thought of jumping off the typical suburban merry go round for a while and traveling a path with a wide open calendar and much less hurry.  I know that plenty of people would be quick to remind me that we will just be trading one set of problems for another.  While that is probably true, I can’t help but feel that my life is finally going to belong just to me and my family.  It’s a freeing (and sometime horrifying) feeling, for sure.

While we wait for those last few months to tick away, I would like to share the how’s and why’s of our decision to leave our life behind and set out on an open ended camping trip around the country.

How do you plan for a Long Term Trip?

After six years of planning, you would think we would have all our ducks in a row, but we are surprisingly unprepared with plenty left on our to-do list.   Lots of the things we have left to do were things that just couldn’t be tackled until we got closer to the go date.   But there are plenty of things that we were able to do in that six year waiting period to make the planning a reality.

1. Timing: When is the best time to go?

The original purpose of the trip was to show the kids the things they would be learning in their American history studies, so that gave us a rough guideline based on our curriculum.  We also wanted to think about the ages of our kids.  Our original plan was to delay the trip until all the kids were old enough to remember the experience, but we also wanted to be mindful of taking the trip before the kids were old enough to be entrenched in activities that they would not want to leave. 

As a perfect illustration of the plans of men oft going awry, we found ourselves with an unintended wide gap between our oldest and youngest kids.   Stuck between a toddler and a teenager, we decided to split the difference, traveling before our oldest hit the surly teenage years, but realizing that our youngest might not remember the entire trip.  A great excuse for doing it again in a few years, if you ask me.

2. Itinerary: Where are we going to go?

With such a long planning period, it was easy to dig into the itinerary to give us a way to dream of the trip.  We have certainly learned that planning is half the fun of traveling, and the more we planned the more we wanted to do.  It was in planning the itinerary that we realized we wanted to extend the life of our trip.  Our original plan was to hit the highlights as quickly as possible, but we almost immediately changed that plan. A good portion of our budget is dedicated to just getting from place to place (have I mentioned we get 8 miles to the gallon?) so it seemed wasteful to travel all those miles and not get the most out of the trip once we arrived.

We chose a traveling path that would take us on circular route of the eastern part of the United States.   We are heading as far north as possible and then working our way south in hopes of keeping good weather on our side.  A large part of the itinerary planning and timing of the trip center around the weather at various parts of the year.  Nobody wants to be camping on the Gulf during hurricane season or hunkering down in a campsite during the first Nor’easter of the year.  Our route had to reflect the climate limitations. 

3. Budgeting: How to afford a long term trip?

If any part of the plan was to get derailed, it would have happened at the budgeting meeting.  Money can be the biggest deterrent to following a dream, but it doesn’t have to be.  That doesn’t mean you don’t have to prioritize.  What seems to be a dirty word to many people, turned out to be our fastest ticket to long term travel possibility- Downsizing!  By selling our home and moving into something much smaller, and by trading our new truck for an older suburban and travel trailer, we were well on our way to meeting our goals.  There were lots of other creative ways that we found to save the money we needed, and while some of them may seem like great sacrifices, they really weren’t.  Once we decided we would rather make memories than collect stuff, it was easy.

4. The Nitty Gritty-What are the details involved in pulling off a long term trip?

The closer we get to the departure date, the longer the list of details grows.Fortunately, there have been plenty of big things we could take care of while we were planning.Honestly, this list of thing probably could (and should) be a post all its own, but just give you a little glimpse…

• Renew passports (I don’t know why I put this at the top of the list, as we haven’t yet done this…)
• Find a place for our animals (Four kids and three dogs in a trailer just passes my crazy threshold, oh, and my parents are saints.)
• Set up as many bills as possible to automatically draft from our account
• Install a home alarm for the times that our house sitters are away
• Hire a yard maintenance company
• Explore our options for mail delivery (likely we will have the mail forwarded to a parent who will help us with any business we need to deal with)
• Visit doctors and dentists to make sure we are up date on all our health needs (haven’t done this either, guess it’s good I’m writing this post.)
• Set up Skype for ourselves and our family
• Make pressing home repairs, such as waterproofing the deck and repairing the fence
• Thoroughly check our tow vehicle and our trailer for any repairs or maintenance needs

Now that you know way more than you probably wanted to know about our how we’ve planned our trip, I’ll let you in on the very simple reason why we are planning this trip.  If you look up at the top of the page underneath the Suitcases and Sippy Cups, you will see my tagline: packing, passports, and the pursuit of family.  Bloggers seem to be compelled to have one of these little phrases that define our purpose at a glance and with as little fuss as possible.

In this case, the clever play on words is the reason we are taking this trip.  Not the packing and passports, although that is part of the equation, but the pursuit of family.  More than seeing great things, and having great experiences, we are hitting the road long term as a way to draw our family closer together, creating for us ties that can never be untangled and memories that will never be forgotten.

In a blink of an eye, more than half the time our oldest son will spend under our roof has elapsed and soon his brothers will follow suit.  The time we have to spend as a family is so, so short and another blink of an eye, our kids will be properly off on adventures of their own.  We want to make the most of the fleeting time that belongs to us, creating for our kids and for ourselves a treasure trove of happy memories that cannot be erased no matter how geography may separate us. 

It is an intangible goal to be sure, but we will pursue it, nonetheless, measuring the success of the trip not in miles covered or monuments seen, but in smiling faces and memories made.