Update from the Road: We’re in the South!

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Six months.

Six months have come and gone on the road.

Heath and I joke that we are married in dog years. A short six months feels like years together and now, we have officially visited 45 of the 50 states in America together! We are in Vicksburg, Mississippi and I can practically see Louisiana out of my window.

We have only one more week on the road. Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, then Texas. Home! Just in time to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with family and friends.

When we finally return home to Texas, I’ll release all of our final stats from the road. Total miles, total hours on the road, average cost per mile of travel, and lots of other fun facts! I hope that sharing this information with you–I plan to release our final financial costs as well–will inspire others to know that extensive travel is possible.

This journey has been arduous but rewarding. We’ve met, and continue to meet, new friends along the road. This past week, we met up with college friends in Atlanta, visited new friends we met in Portland back in July, and stayed with some of Heath’s family he hasn’t seen since his childhood.

This trip has given us opportunities to visit dozens of friends and family across the country. We visited friends from California all the way across to Virginia and stayed with family in Colorado, Michigan, and Alabama. Heck–we’ve even stayed on THREE farms during our travels! There is never a dull moment.

But now our travels are wrapping up and we will soon park Franklin in a mechanic’s lot for a few days to get him fixed up and ready for round 2! Yes, there’s a round two coming.

As you know by now, we are filming a documentary across the country. It sounds cool, but it isn’t exactly a lucrative field. While our sponsorship covers our gas, we spent the first few months on the road trying to find ways to make enough money to break even.

Back in September, Heath found an opportunity to work with an author friend, Jia Jiang, who just finished writing a book with Random House. With experience in almost every state in America by now, I suppose Heath is a pretty good worker so after we finish traveling to all 50 states, he will start working full time with Jia. So…

We’re moving!

After our stop in Texas, we will take Franklin back across the country to Silicon Valley in California. We will live in California until April–that’s about as far into the future as we can plan. Fortunately, Franklin has survived the trek across all of America, so we are taking him out to California. We will give him a few months off from adding thousands of miles on the odometer and live in Franklin as our full-time home.

Throughout our travels, people often ask us if we will continue RVing or what we will do with Franklin. Yes, we will continue RVing! We’ve seen so much across the country, but there is so much more that we want to see. I think every RVer says that 😉

So, for the foreseeable future, we will be living in California. Heath will be planning a cross-country book tour (He knows geography really well now) while I begin editing our film, which is planned to release in August 2015.

There is so much ahead of us! But for now, we are trying to enjoy one last week on the road together for Hourly America. Only five more states to go until the end…