Here’s the rough adventure plan.
- Quit job
- Buy a camping trailer
- Go on some shorter test trips
- Pair down on our belongings
- Rent out our house
- Go on a long trip (~6 months)
- Figure out what to do next
Quit job
Check. My last day is April 2nd.
Buy a camping trailer
Actually, we just did this a couple of weeks ago. We’ll introduce the trailer in an upcoming post.
Go on some shorter test trips
We’ve now gone on two short trips– one overnight, and one week long trip. I’ll report more about those trips shortly. In the coming months we’re planning one or two month-long adventures to warm up to long-term travel.
Pair down on our belongings
We’ve started this process. It’s incredible how much stuff builds up in a house (especially given that we’ve only lived in ours for 7 years.) We’ve started with the easy stuff– the things that we didn’t even know we had, hidden in cabinets or boxes. However, there are some challenging areas we still need to tackle.
Rent out our house
Some of our income while we’re on the road will be from renting out our house. We’re nervous about this, but it would be crazy to leave an income-producing asset sitting idle for a long period of time.
Go on a long trip
We’re planning to take off from our home in Portland, OR around October 2018, just as the weather here starts to turn to rain. We’ll travel south to warmer climates (aka snowbirding it), and return to Portland in the Spring of 2019.
Figure out what to do next
We don’t know for sure if being vagabonds is a lifestyle we’ll enjoy or not long term. For our honeymoon, Sarah and I traveled by camper-van for 3 weeks to many of the west coast national parks. By the end of 3 weeks of high-paced travel, every beautiful sight started to look the same (“oh look, another hole in the ground” as we gazed at the Grand Canyon). My hope is that by traveling at a much slower pace– actually living at each location rather than racing from one to the next, that the we’ll find more long-term enjoyment in the adventure. But we won’t know until we try it.