Why? Why on earth?

Why? Why on earth would we want to sell most everything we own and live out of a camper?

As I am anticipating making the announcement that this is the new lifestyle we as a family have chosen, this is one of the questions I'm expecting.

As with any explanation I come up with for some of my crazy ideas, I have many reasons.  While we are so excited to travel the country, see so many interesting sites, slow down a little, and spend some serious quality time with each other, there is one reason that it all boils down to... For me at least.

Because we only live once, and we don't know how long that will be.

So why not grab life by the horns and enjoy every single moment.

Do the things we dream about.

The past year and a half have been life-changing for me.  I've had close, dear friends recently lose babies, husbands, moms, dads, and we almost lost my father in-law.  All of those deaths and near-deaths were unexpected, fast, and traumatic.  It truly has changed my perspective on life.  

I have a little anxiety built up in my chest over telling my parents, my sister in-law, mother in-law, and my husband's grandparents about this move.  Mostly because they are the people who are physically close and will be impacted by this change.  I truly hope they can see where we are coming from with this and will be supportive. I just hope this news is met with understanding, I hope they share in our excitement, and don't start fights over it.   

(I'd like to give credit for the image posted, but it was found on Pinterest and led to a hospice site.)

Introduction to Intentionally Wandering

Hello! Welcome to the new blog!  We are a family of four with two small children, living a wonderful life in a beautiful 3,000 square foot house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, with nice cars, a great elementary school, and a bunch of family nearby.  What more could we ask for, right?

Well.... we are ready to leave it all behind.  We are going to sell our house, our SUV, and pretty much all of our belongings so that we can live on the road.  We will buy a camper, pull our kids out of school, and hit the road to explore our beautiful country.  We will start 'road-schooling' our children, visiting many different monuments, national parks, attractions, cities, etc along the way.  Our intent will be to work on our relationships within our small family, while wandering the countryside to be more of a part of nature.  We will be in some pretty remote locations at times, and will have to learn how to "make it work" when we don't have our regular amenities close by.  There are inevitably going to be moments of insane frustration with each other and with homeschooling our children, as well as trouble with our rig, finding our way, and any other mishaps that happen on such a long journey.  We have no end date in mind for this adventure.  We'll just go until it no longer works for us.  

I will be leaving my portrait photography business behind, and will have to find a way to make some money while photographing on the road.  As the bread winner for the family, Aaron is hopeful that he can work with his current job to turn his part-time telecommuting into a full-time telecommuting arrangement so that he isn't tied down to a certain location.

We haven't told our family yet that we are planning to do this.  They ARE NOT going to be happy.  Mainly, because we'll be taking the children away from them. Plus, this is such a drastic lifestyle difference from the way most people live, so they will have many concerns about how we are going to educate and socialize our children, as well as work and live in a positive manner.

Before we can head out, there are many steps we will have to take first. We sold our beautiful but big dog yesterday to a very nice family who will hopefully love him as much as we did.  It was really sad for us to leave him behind, but he wouldn't have been happy on the road.  He is so large that he would have constantly been in the way in the cramped quarters.  Next, we will sell my SUV.  Again, I'll be sad to see this go, because I love that car.  In the end though, it is just a car and if I want another one once we find a place to land, then I'll get one.  The next big step will be getting our house ready to sell and putting it on the market.  Thankfully, I have a wonderful brother who is a rock star in the real estate world and helped me find another rock star in our area.  I would have loved to hire my brother, obviously, but he isn't in our local area.  After that we will be selling most of our belongings.  We will store the sentimental items and a couple pieces of the large furniture, but everything else will go. After all, we are looking to live a simpler life and after we are done with this adventure, we are planning to live in a much smaller home than we do now.  So we're choosing to sell everything to raise money for the road.

In the midst of all that, we are researching, researching, researching.  We are trying to find a camper that will fit our needs and budget, figuring out if we need to buy a bigger truck, and searching for tons of information about many different aspects of life on the road.  We need to figure out when to break the news to the family too.  I've been pleasantly surprised by the community of full time RV families that I've found so far.  There are some that have small children like we do, some with older children, some that are in their retirement stages, etc.  I'm excited to start meeting these people on the road.  Multiple rallies are held each year for these families to meet and catch up and some even caravan together for months at a time to build strong friendships, for the adults and for the kids.

We hope that you follow us on this journey while we figure out what life on the open road is all about!