To Go or Not To Go

Making the decision to travel was difficult because we were nervous about changing our lives and moving away from our families. I was also nervous about leaving my job. At the time we made this decision, it was before COVID so I would have been leaving a steady job and jumping into travel therapy, which at the time also seemed fairly steady (however, not as steady as a full time job). Before COVID, getting a travel PT job was tough enough because you are up against all the therapists in the country rather than just in the local area. 

Once COVID started, the job market decreased substantially. It has been slowly picking back up, but its even harder to get a travel job now because there are so many therapists who need work, but few job opportunities. The timing of all of this made us question whether we should continue with this plan or if we needed to put it on the back burner.

We decided that we wanted to pursue it despite the unforeseen circumstances and the greater challenges presented to us. We feel that we could do the safe approach and put it off, but chances are if we don’t do it now, we never will. Life is not always going to be smooth, easy, and predictable and some of the best times come from taking risks so that’s what we have decided to do.

How to Go About It: Pre-COVID Plans

We spent all our free time figuring out a plan starting with housing. We spent a lot of time researching the different options and I talked to multiple friends who are travel PTs so that I could hear their advice and learn from them. I also spent a lot of time reading comments on several travel therapy forums to see what worked for others.

We initially decided we would try out renting a furnished house or apartment in whatever location I got a job in. There are different websites such as furnished finder and Airbnb that allows people to rent out furnished rooms, apartments, or houses for short-term contracts. We thought this would be a good plan because then we wouldn’t have to worry about furnishing a place and we could pack a lot less.

Next, we had to figure out what to do with our cars. We could either drive both of our cars to wherever we go, or we could sell one of them. We decided it was best to sell one of the cars. We didn’t want to drive separately, and we didn’t want to pay twice as much in gas. 

Selling Ryan’s car seemed like the best option. He loved his Scion tC and it still ran really well, but it had over 120,000 miles on it and was being held together by duct tape so we just didn’t think it was worth driving it around the country, especially because we knew that we wanted to head towards the west coast. It just didn’t seem worth it to drive his car all that way if the car already had that many miles on it. We had originally planned to drive my RAV4. It was in much better condition than his tC and should have been fine to drive around the country, but our plans changed…

To learn more about how our plans changed, continue reading the next story.