Game On!

To say that there has been a LOT going on since our last post in October would be a major understatement… where to begin…

As the camping season started to wind down and the holidays came and went, Darryl and I had to make some tough decisions about the real possibility of making this trip happen.  It has been months and months of back and forth – will we or won’t we?  Can we?  Can we NOT?  Are we ready?  Will we ever be ready? Can we afford it?  What about the kids?  I get whiplash just thinking about how many times we changed our minds.

And that is just the logical, logistical side of the decision.  I have been very surprised at the emotional toll that making this decision has taken on us both – individually and as a couple.  That’s part of the reason why we haven’t been as active on the blog as we had been… we just haven’t had the emotional energy to document this decision-making process.  And with the crappy winter weather around here, there wasn’t much going on by way of riding or camping… eating and drinking, yes…

I guess it was over the holidays that we decided to take the advice we have been giving our kids for years when making a big decision – make one decision at a time, and then make the next one.  Don’t try to figure it all out at once, and don’t try to pretend that you can predict where the story ends.  So we started to put together some lists, identified some go/no go decision points, and started to take some (reversible) baby steps forward into making the trip a reality.

Would we have to sell the house?  If so, when?

What are the kids going to think? Can we actually leave our current area?

What are we going to do with all of our stuff?

Jobs… friends…. Family…

And about a million more… because, you know, we tend to overanalyze…

Between Christmas and New Year’s, Darryl went out to Baja to go riding with friends (videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa6VN4d1qhobJm2GKPGxFVg ).  It was a rough ride in spots, and when he came back, he said wasn’t sure if he wanted to be on the road all the time.

Then we were home for a few weeks, and wanted to be out on the road.  So we planned a trip for early February to go visit our friend Greg down in Florida.  Long story short – Darryl’s bike was stolen our first night in FL, so we turned around and came right back home.  Darryl has had bikes stolen in the past, but it was the first time I have ever experienced having anything stolen like that – and it really shook me, much more than I ever expected.  It made me feel so unsafe, so uncertain – and I just wanted to go home.  But what if we didn’t have a home to go back to?  I think this really made us both completely rethink the idea of this trip (and our bike/trailer security systems) and what it would mean.

Like I said… back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…

The next big decision point was the house – do we sell, or not?  If we sell it, that seals the deal.  We had talked about putting it on the market in March – so we talked to our realtor who had some potential buyers interested in our school district.  We hadn’t officially put the house on the market yet, but we let our realtor schedule a walk-through on a Saturday, and we decided to take advantage of some warm weather and get the trailer out and head for the mountains.

You know what’s next, right?  Yep – we had barely unpacked our bags at the trailer and our realtor texted me saying one offer was coming in with a second offer expected.  Within 24 hours we had two full-priced offers!

Oh shit…

We cut our camping trip short by a day and headed home to make some decisions.  I think it is the first time that we have driven all the way home from a camping weekend without saying a word.  We had talked and talked and talked about it – and now we both had to come to a decision on our own – did we want to do this thing or not?

Part of the emotional confusion over the last few months has been an unexpected lack of excitement about the prospect of the trip.  At first, we were SO excited about the idea of the trip… we read blogs about other people who had similar adventures, watched hundreds of hours of YouTube videos from full-time RV’ers… we even bought a US road map and mounted it on foamcore to plot out our route (complete with colorful pushpins!).

But as the decision-date moved closer, the excitement turned into something else.  Dread?  Panic?  I’m not even sure what word to use… I just know that I felt completely sick to my stomach and anxious ALL the time!  Darryl too.

Was something or someone trying to tell us that this wasn’t the right move?  Why weren’t we more excited about this?

And now we had to decide… are we in?  Or are we out?

Our realtor came over with the two offers, and walked us through everything.  And then Darryl and I both just kind of looked at each other, and without a word signed the papers.  She must have asked us a dozen times – are you sure you want to do this?  You don’t have to do this right now if you aren’t ready!  But we signed.

For the first few hours after we signed the papers, there was no celebration, no excitement… we both felt like we wanted to throw up.  Dinner?  No – not this night.  Just a glass of wine (or three) to calm our frazzled nerves, and a whole lot of wide-eyed “what the F#*% did we just do” looks at each other.

But after a few hours, we started talking about how we are going to make this work – the places we will go, the things we will do.  And how, just like most things, this is a work in progress – we can make this into whatever we want it to be (or nothing at all).  And a little bit of the dread started to go away.

It’s now been about a month since we sold the house, and we are 5 weeks out from the beginning of the adventure.  D-day is April 28 – and without any hesitation I can say that these last four weeks have been HARD!  I just can’t express how difficult it has been to downsize our lives the way we are right now.  Who knew it would be so tough to simplify your life??  And the number of decisions we have had to make has been mind-boggling.

But we keep chipping away at the to-do list, and every day we take another step forward.  And little by little and anxiety is giving way to excitement and every day brings us a little closer to being as ready as we will ever be for our trip of a lifetime.