A Moment of Gratitude from The Open Road

As I sit here at a campsite looking out over the Colorado River, I can’t help but feel so fortunate and so blessed to be living the life we’ve chosen. Anybody who knows us really well knows that we’ve been through some hard things in life but we’ve just kept plugging along and trying to make the best of everything, no matter what came our way.

But when we started our nomadic lifestyle and started finding new adventures around every bend, that’s when we felt like we truly started living. Travel is in our blood and we just love it so much. It’s so good for the soul.

It doesn’t come without sacrifices though and that’s more the point of this post. People often ask us how we do it. When we meet people and they find out we’re just wandering around the country and traveling full time, they’re curious. Everyone wants to know if we’re retired or if we live in an RV. And of course, we tell them: no and no.

We aren’t wealthy. We make enough money to pay for our necessities and a little extra but we aren’t getting rich by any means. We work from the road - quite literally a lot of the time. I’ll be sitting in the passenger seat with my computer in my lap doing work as we drive. Sometimes we sit at a campground, like I am now, and put in some time on our work. And sometimes we hole up in a hotel room and work for many hours straight. It just depends on the day and what’s going on.

We also choose not to travel with an RV. We don’t want to have the burden of pulling something and being restricted with where we can travel. We see how much trouble some people have with their RVs and we just don’t want that hassle. We have a rooftop tent on our truck right now and have loved camping with that. We have some plans for an upgrade soon that will be really exciting if we can make it all come together. More details soon on that. ;)

But as I mentioned, we’ve made sacrifices in order to be able to live this life. When we started this lifestyle we had to get rid of most of our possessions. We kept things we’d need for travel, we kept some keepsakes and sentimental things, and we kept some things that we wouldn’t want to have to replace if we decided to stop traveling sooner rather than later. Everything else - we sold, donated, or gave away. So not only have we given up our “things” but we don’t have a home anymore. We traded a mortgage payment and utility bills for camping fees, hotel costs, and higher fuel costs. There are trade offs for everything and this trade off was totally worth it to us.

We’ve been to so many amazing places in the last 5 years. We’ve met a lot of amazing people and shared some incredible experiences with each other as well as with friends - old and new. We’ve crawled out of our tent to amazing views in the morning and we’ve sat and enjoyed nature in some beautiful areas. And we couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t given up so much.

Life is short and we want to live it now.

Sometimes I actually get sad thinking about all the places I want to go see because I know that there’s no way to see it all in my lifetime. We have no idea how many days we’ve got left and I’m already well past “middle” age considering the average life expectancy for a woman is 84 years old - which has been on the rise in recent years so that’s a plus at least. If I’m lucky I still have many years left to enjoy this amazing world we call home but we shall see. I’ve known others who weren’t as lucky and their lives were cut short - some even younger than I am now. We lost my father-in-law at the age of 51 so I’m thankful for the years I’ve gotten with James. We’ve been together 37 years this year and I hope for many, many more.

So we will continue to give up some things in life to continue being able to do these things that bring us joy. This is what matters to us way more than any material thing could provide. We might not get rich by the world’s standards but we are very rich with what matters to us.

And I can live with that.