This has been a life changing year for everyone to say the least. We have had so many reasons to be sad, angry, frustrated and just the overall feeling of hopelessness and loneliness. This has been an extraordinarily hard year for everyone and the uncertainty of knowing if or when life will resemble any sort of normalcy is daunting.

We are happy to hear that most of our family and friends have been relatively healthy despite the threat of the virus. However, we know that many of you are currently facing other challenges because of this pandemic.

Ryan and I have faced our share of trials and tribulations as well, but luckily for us, these difficulties have been fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. They are not always easy to cope with, but we try to remember to be grateful for our health and for each other. We are also thankful for the health, love and support of our family and friends. 

Even though it seems as though nothing good has come from this year, we have decided to find the good in it as best we can. Ryan and I made a life-changing decision at the start of the year that we have been excited to share with everyone. Despite the pandemic, we have not changed our decision, however we have had to change how we planned to go about it several times.

Ryan and I have made the decision to spend the next couple of years traveling around the United States before we find the place we want to settle down and start a family. We want to share our journey with you so that we can keep you all close to us while we are away. We hope you enjoy hearing our adventures!

How We Came to the Decision

Throughout my life, whenever anyone would ask me what the one place is that I would want to visit, I would always say “I can’t pick just one, I want to see as much of the world as I can”. 

While on our honeymoon in Southeast Asia, we had several discussions about how we are happiest when traveling and how seeing the world brings this sense of joy and peacefulness to us.

I remember saying to Ryan how I would love to just spend my life traveling and seeing as much of the world as I can. I was happy to hear that Ryan felt the same way. At first, we talked about it in the way that most of these conversations begin: a typical vacationer not wanting to return to reality. The conversation originally began as a far-fetched dream with both of us thinking how crazy and silly we are being. Of course, we can’t spend the next several years traveling, we just have vacation goggles on! 

We talked about how normal life means that we are supposed to get married, buy a house, and have a family. It’s important to have a steady job and stability. There is no way anyone can spend their life traveling, it’s ridiculous! We thought we would just have to wait until we retire to travel the world. So, we returned home and continued with our normal lives and tried to push the dream away.

In mid-January, we returned to the discussion of travel. We were back to reality and we were content with our lives, but still felt like there was something better out there for us. We continued our conversation, but this time we both knew that we were determined to find a way to make this work out. 

When we talked again about what normal life means, we realized we didn’t care about following the “normal life” pattern. Neither of us are normal so why should we try to act like it. Life is boring when you follow suit with the rest of the world. Ryan and I realized that neither one of us have ever done anything out of the norm. We both went to school and got good grades, didn’t get into any trouble, got good jobs and now we’re married. So far, our lives have been rather good, but where is the fun in life if we don’t take a risk? 

As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, 

“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” 

We realized that we didn’t have to follow the typical plan, there are other options out there for us and it is up to us to figure out what those options are and to decide if we want to take the risk.

We spent the next couple of weeks discussing different options. We had talked about living in Asia for a year, specifically Thailand, or maybe Europe, or Puerto Rico. We have two kitties, and we didn’t think it would be fair to make them travel on an airplane. We know that many people fly with their pets, but we just didn’t want to do that with them, which ruled out those options. Our next thought was possibly driving to Central America, but I decided I didn’t want to practice physical therapy outside of the US.

Then we discussed the idea of moving to another state for a year or two, but when we tried to figure out which state to choose, we couldn’t decide. That’s how we came up with the plan to travel the US. There are so many breathtakingly beautiful places in the US that we would love to see. How could we possibly narrow it down by choosing only one state?

We did a lot of research on the best way to go about our plan. Ryan already works from home so he can work anywhere. With my profession, I can be a travel physical therapist. I have signed up with multiple agencies who can help me find short term contracts in any state that I am licensed in. This sounded like the best option. The contracts are typically 3 months; however, some can be shorter or longer. This will allow us some time to explore the area that we are based in, but I can also take as much time off in between assignments as we want so that we can take our time traveling from one destination to the next.

When we first started realizing that this was a realistic option, we were initially really excited. We couldn’t believe that we had found a way to travel while still making an income. We were nervous about leaving our friends and family and a place of familiarity to seek out this new adventure. There are so many new things for us to learn, so much planning and researching that must go into this decision.

And now with a pandemic, we thought our plans to travel might not happen. We discussed our options. Should we continue with the plan? Should we postpone it? How long would we have to postpone it? We didn’t want to delay our plans too long because we want to have enough time to travel before starting a family. So, we decided to continue with our plans to travel, but we knew the hows and whens of it all will likely have to change. We would just have to do more planning and be flexible so that we could do what we want but be safe as well.

This is a strange time to try to travel and people will probably think we’re nuts, but we figured if we don’t do it now, we never would. We just have to take extra precautions and plan everything differently than we originally thought. It’s never easy stepping out of your comfort zone and going into unchartered waters, but we would be crazy to let our fear hold us back. If we have this opportunity, we must take it! In order to live our lives to the fullest, we have decided that we are ready to take the leap of faith!