Category: Uncategorized

T-Minus 11 days.

The more we put time and effort into closing down our modern lives and becoming pilgrims the more unknowns we discover. The unknown has its perks though, we have thought of places and people to visit and come up with creative ways to make our journey last. But it also has its difficulties. How does one prepare to leave a known existance and plan for the unknown?

I find myself reorganizing, repacking, replanning, and pairing down but none of it makes sense. Michael and I have talked about taking the time to do the camino in order to have time to talk about what we want to do with our time off. That was a great idea in theory, but it leaves a lot unknown.

Maybe this is just what it feels like to rebel against modern society. 

I guess thats the thing with this adventure, I am seeing there are a lot of dichotomies. On one hand, we have been planning for this for a year now. On the other, there are so many unanswered questions. On one hand, we value our friends and loved ones. On the other, its important for us to try out living 7 hours away from them. On one hand we are longing for a place to call our own and to build our business. On the other, this is a window of opportunity we feel driven to explore. And the grand dichotomy of it all, literally all my favorite people are having babies and planning a large portion of their lives to accomodate their young ones, while I am cutting off commitments and leaping into the unknown.

Well, I feel like this blog describes it… I am all over the place. Filled with contentment, peace, and terrified at the same time. If that’s not living life to its fullest, I don’t know what is.

For some, imagining life without debt is strange. I remember as my husband and I were preparing to get married he explained financial concepts from Dave Ramsey and the debt snowball. At the time, I was working full time and finishing my undergraduate degree. It was a dream of mine to study abroad in Italy for my last semester of college. However, as the date moved closer and financial requirements became more real, I realized I hardly had the money. I remember it like yesterday, crying to Michael, “but I got accepted to the program, I only need a few thousand dollars more!” Michael looked at me lovingly and said, “Right now, you can’t afford it.”

While I would love to share some tale of giving up my young 22 year old dreams and choosing to live debt free…. that’s not what happened. Instead, I got financial aid and went on the trip anyway. However, seeing numbers the way Michael did and looking hard at debt and how long I would be paying for this trip (LONG after the trip was done) did in fact change me. So when we got married, I gratefully accepted Dave Ramsey into my life and our first 18 months of marriage were spent working our butts off and getting debt free. Though this goal was important to me, it really didn’t hit me what it meant until we were debt free. The day that we paid off the last of my school loan debt was incredible! I began to see that no debt equaled more income each month to spend how we PRESENTLY wanted to spend it. I didn’t have to keep paying for the past. And more income, meant more TIME. Unpaid time off = no problem! Money was no longer something that was hung over my head, it was a tool to be used in any way we wanted.

As the beginning of this journey approaches I am struck with the feeling that the journey had already begun that day we married and decided debt wasn’t going to be apart of our family. Being debt free laid the foundation for this crazy leap into a self supported sabbatical.

27 days to go!

In my mind, when I pictured this time, coming home from a friends wedding in Bend, I had thought things would be so together. I’d be more fit. I’d feel a bit more confident about our upcoming journey. I’d be creating the plan for starting my private practice again. And yet, I am here, still not back in shape, house disorganized, a garage of stuff that still needs to be sold. It occurred to me, maybe this is it. Maybe it is not some future image of myself that will be completing the Camino. It will be my same, not as in shape as I used to be, can’t always find the right words, painfully empathic, self.

It reminded me of a woman named Dee Williams I once heard speak about receiving a terminal diagnosis and deciding to build a tiny house. She said she realized “all of the sudden, you have to get real comfortable with who you are. Because who you are may be all you are ever going to be.”

38 days to go…

Over the past five years that my husband and I have been married we have continually sought time together. Uninterrupted adventurous time. When we got married we had two weeks for a honeymoon but the Army put a number of restrictions on what we could do.  So we planned that we would take a month off when Michael got out of the army but it didn’t happen. Then we planned to take a month off when I finished graduate school but it didn’t happen. Needless to say when Michael began to plan for finishing graduate school we both knew that month off together had to happen this time. Luckily, its safe to say, 49 days away, that it is going to happen!

This has been an evolving dream that has taken time and experience to form. It began as a desire to backpack through Europe, then it morphed into taking Military Space A flights to anywhere, then it morphed into building a camper and driving it across the US to Asheville, then it changed to doing the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. And finally we have found ourselves in a glorious place to do the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and return home to drive across the US with our truck camper. This trip seems enormous but I cannot stress enough how its has naturally formed over our five years together. 

Our plans began to solidify last Spring when our house caught fire and we lost most of our belongings. We were homeless for about two months as we choose not to stay in a hotel to be with our dog and avoid moving in and out of a hotel room. From the day of the fire, our homemade truck camper was a refuge as we lived in it for two months looking for a new place to live. It was during this time our life was paired down for us. We couldn’t believe how much stuff we had until we had to put it into a spreadsheet to show the insurance. After completing a 3,000 + line spreadsheet we knew we could never go back to that way of living. It came to my attention that having a lot of stuff is a HUGE burden, especially after a house fire, flood, or break in. Being faced with the reality that insurance will give you some money but you have to first remember and catalog each item has made owning superfluous stuff a risk to be avoided.

It was at that time that we realized we had the ability to do the Camino. We lived out of backpacks for two months and rarely missed any of the other stuff. 

But as I was closing down my private practice and turning down a chance to renew a therapy contract, I realized how much work taking a month off was. I began to contemplate what other productive things could we do with time off. We might never be as unattached as we are about to be. No jobs, no house, no kids, no debt. Wow. It then became a part of the plan that we would move to Bend Oregon. We had always dreamed of moving there as we have been driving down for long weekends at least twice a year for five years.

We then began to plan ending our lease and packing up everything into a storage unit. It then came to my attention, where will we live for a couple days before we leave and when we get back. The camper!

THEN… I thought, if we are staying in the camper and everything we own in storage, why not take that cross country trip!

So here we are. Planning to pack most of our belongings into a storage unit, put three months of stuff into the camper, go do the Camino, come home to drive across America and visit all the family and friends we possibly can and then move to Bend. I can’t wait to see what happens!