Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me – Walt Whitman
We are going on a road trip. For six months. We’ve taken leave from work, given our landlord notice and done our best to purge all of our extra belongings. And so begins an expedition of sorts, an odyssey to explore the West, see where an unstructured life will take us, and give ourselves time to exhale and relax and just be. Here’s why.
Why Not?! It seems like a no brainer – if you find yourself with the opportunity to take a sabbatical and put some wanderlusting into action, why on Earth wouldn’t you? Well, yes. But it’s so much easier dreamt than done. We, like most of you, have for years heard about those people who have cast aside their responsibilities, sold their belongings and quit their jobs and traveled the world. And we always thought wow, I wish we could do that. How lucky those people must be. And then it hit me about a year ago. Why not? For better or worse, I have always been someone who thought: if he can do it, I can do it. And so we started to really think about it and to think about what we would want to do with some time off.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. – John Muir
If Not Now, When? The thing about life is that it keeps coming at you. Each day rolls by relentlessly and seems to go by faster and faster. Ryan and I are in our early thirties, well on our way to settling down, starting a family, and continuing a lifetime of heading into the office each day (and sometimes weekends), but amazingly at this moment without any financial obligations tying us down. We have paid off my student loans (hallelujah!), we don’t have any mortgages, and don’t yet have any children (aside from our furbaby, of course). And so we find ourselves quite free, for probably the first and only time in our lives. Perhaps more importantly, Ryan and I are both at a point of transition in our lives. A time where we are soul searching and wondering and reassessing – or at least at the point where we’d love to be able to soul search and wonder and reassess if only we had the time and space in our minds to do that. What a luxury (albeit it a very hard earned luxury) that we have this opportunity, and how fortuitous that we both want to take some time at the same time for such a break. And we just keep thinking if we don’t do this now, life will happen, obligations will arise, our situations will change and we may not be able to or may not want to take some time for this journey. It seems as though our stars have aligned and we are jumping off the cliff and seeing what happens.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It’s always our self we find in the sea. -e.e. Cummings
What’s the Worst That Can Happen? So if we take some time off, we get on the road and get bored (unlikely), run out of money (more likely) or decide WHAT HAVE WE DONE, we can come back. It’s as simple as that. We have supportive workplaces that have allowed us to take time off rather than forcing our resignations, though we were prepared to embark on this journey even without the safety of a job when we return. We can always find a new apartment. And so we can come back. Of course things will have changed, and this is certainly a risk. But in taking a step back, looking big picture and calculating the risks, for us the bigger risk is to not take this time to decompress and reevaluate our trajectory. Or just to take some time off for an adventure. In the end, we will most regret the chances we didn’t take. The What-Ifs, the Should-Have-Dones, the Wish-I-Could-Do-It-Overs. I will inevitably have these regrets in my life; I think that is a part of life. But my regrets won’t be over the dream of a few months in a camper on a road trip exploring this great country of ours.
And so in about a month, we’ll be off. We’ll head south and will start our road trip, in our camper, with our furbaby, and we’ll wind our way north, campfire by campfire, national park by national park, day by day, to Alaska and back. We will share details and lessons, photos and stories, here on the blog, and on Facebook and Instagram. And I hope in person. We would LOVE for you to join us along the way.
Adventurously yours,
Jackie, Ryan + Coconut
BY Jackie
LOCATION San Francisco, California
PHOTOS Jackie and Esther
