Waking up in the morning we rushed to get ready and out the door. We jumped into the van, started the car and couldn’t be happier. We got to the end of the street, stopped at the stop light and Myles said to me “so where are we going?” We had spent so much of our time defending this trip to friends and family it hadn’t fully set in the enormity of what we are about to do. We both came from extremely hard working families and have a small circle of friends that all aspire to the American Dream of starting families while working in a stable career with a nice home. We’ve both spent the majority of our adult life trying to figure out where we fit in that puzzle. Our friends and family have very lovingly been concerned about our safety and I’m sure at times our mental state for doing something so unknown and seemingly impossible. While we completely understand their concerns, we have held strong to our dreams and found solutions to anything in our way – and boy did we have a lot in our way! We had within the last year purchased a brand new Jeep Wrangler that as much as we loved, we couldn’t keep due to the expensive monthly payment, the high insurance prices and the crippling gas consumption. With selling that, we had no hope of avoiding a significant loss due to negative equity. Our biggest barrier but we needed to find a way to crush it. With that we laid out all our options and in a complete fluke found relish, a vanagon a bit rough on the eyes but otherwise in great shape. We bought her for $4,000 and after a couple weeks of sanding her down and getting her ready for some new paint she was beautiful. After being about $5,500 deep she was looking great and we were ready to sell her. We were able to show her really well and by some stroke of luck got $11,000 for her. So, that covered that hurdle. We were lucky enough to have the coolest landlords in the world who not only understood our dreams but had done a similar trip before so we were able to make our last minute adventure happen. While we had our dreams, they were just that, more of a fantasy than a plan. Our actual deciding point was our injuries. Myles concussion effects every day of our life. He is living with constant migraines and gets dizzy, becomes extremely sensitive to light, heat, sounds, everything. My ankle and knee also effects every single day. I can no longer squat to bend, kneel and at times even walk. The combination for us has allowed us to learn more about the other, be much more sensitive and has actually strangely brought us closer but that isn’t to say it has not been difficult and at times seemingly impossible. Our injuries caused an even greater concern for our loved ones that we wouldn’t be able to do this. We hadn’t really thought about what would happen on the trip, we just knew we needed to go. So now that we are on it, we honestly didn’t know where to start. We picked a direction we hadn’t gone before, filled up the gas and are now driving into the unknown… Stay tuned! ✌️
– S
