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In 2014, we started traveling as young broke newlyweds. Fast forward nearly a decade and two years later and we’re getting back to our roots. We sold everything to travel again just like we used to.
In 2020 in the heat of the pandemic, we bought a house after traveling full-time for six years. It was the right thing in the moment, what with travel being shut down and a one year old running around the motorhome. Without travel, we also stopped making travel videos on Youtube.
Today our first new video series is going live! Yay for getting to RV internationally again!
You can watch the first video on Youtube and start an epic European road trip with us.
The vlog series continues with our theme of international RV travel. We will spend 30 days traveling across the countryside of France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain.
A few of the highlights & videos to come:
- Sharing how we travel & sleep in a small RV with two little kids (easily my biggest fear before the trip)
- Our reactions to visiting a French national park (when I think of France I think of the food and the Paris culture and not necessarily the national parks but WOW)
- The time we tried to visit one of the smallest countries in Europe but instead got food poisoning, and I passed out
- How the Harvest Hosts program in France is EPIC and what wineries stays are like over there
- And much more
While I’m excited to share more of the videos in this series, I also wanted to share the inspiration and wake-up call that led to us going on this trip in the first place.
What do you do when dreams change?
I recently sat down and shared a reading list of 100 of my top books. One I read last year was called The Paradox of Choice, and so much of it has stuck with me.
There’s a quote in particular I love:
“We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree that we expect.”
The book goes on to talk about how we often are terrible at knowing what decisions will actually make us happy. We base future decisions on data that is largely skewed by our memory.
For example, when it comes to a memory of a weeklong vacation, we’re more likely to remember the peak moment or how it ended. Even if the week was boring but ended with a bang, we’d consider it a massive success. Our brain remembers the peak and the end and often forgets how we felt during the majority of the week-long vacation.
There were many more examples, but the point is that we often don’t accurately remember how something truly made us feel. Yet, we use that flawed previous data to make future decisions about what we might want.
Well, earlier this summer I got something I wanted:
Time.
Over the last year, we sold a few businesses and after a year of vesting with my new employer, I quit.
On top of professional time, Alyssa and I gained some personal time with some childcare help (something else we’d been desperately searching for).
I remember sitting down at my computer during our first day with childcare and feeling euphoric. This was it. This was the moment we’d been waiting for. We had time to breathe and dream up what we want to do next in life and business.
Then I journaled some more. Then I opened a book. Put that book down and got another one. Left my computer to go outside and do a project I’d been putting off. Came back inside to do some more “work” on my computer (had nothing to work on, probably scrolled Twitter). Twenty minutes later I went to the gym to shoot some baskets. Then it was five o’clock and time to pick up Ellie from school.
This went on for a few days.
Then a week passed.
I started leaving around two or three to go pick up Ellie because I missed her and wanted to hang out and play.
I started realizing this dream I’d placed on a pedestal actually was kind of boring.
Or maybe I was boring, I don’t know.
A thought started to occur to me as I grappled with my boredom.
Maybe the vision for our lives in this season looks different than I’d thought. I’d imagined Alyssa and I would hang out in Colorado, maybe start or buy a new business, or find a new project.
But as I sat at my computer, nothing called to me. I realized there was no work I’d rather be doing than spending precious time with our kids.
For years, I’ve done a journaling practice where I ask myself the question, “If I could do anything with my day, what would I do?”
And for the first time in my life I actually could answer that question in reality and not in theory.
What I realized is that if I could design my perfect day and minimize potential future regret, it would look like going on awesome adventures and making memories as a family.
So that’s what we decided to do. We booked a one-way RV rental from Paris to Barcelona and spent the last month gallivanting around the European countryside eating more food (and visiting more playgrounds) than I ever thought possible.
Sometimes I feel like it’s not okay to change my mind.
I like putting big goals on the horizon and pointing toward them and getting after it. But sometimes a new baby comes and all of a sudden that dream seems less important. Or maybe you realize that your dream is actually meh and you don’t want it after all.
So, we sold everything to travel.
Our software business, our campground, our podcast, our conference, everything that could hold us back.
I still love coming up with big ideas to pursue and chasing dreams makes life interesting. But sometimes, dreams change. That’s okay, too.
If you want to see what came out of my life epiphany, you can watch the first vlog of our France RV trip 🙂
