I seriously cannot believe everything we’ve accomplished in the last week! Final yard & tool sale, multiple trips to the storage unit, Father’s Day, Jess’ birthday, a trip to the theater, emptying the house, throwing a House Cooling Party, and finally pulling away! WE DID IT! I think we are all SO exhausted nothing has even sunk in yet. Give me a week in Bryce Canyon and I”ll let you know how we feel after that. 😉
As you can imagine things have been a bit crazy around here. We have been working like crazy people trying to sell the rest of our belongings, as well as finishing up projects in the Airstream.
Here’s a look at our progress on the house, and what we still need to accomplish by FRIDAY! Ahhhh! I might be freaking out just a little.
Travel Dates: June 7-13, 2014
Work projects and play. That’s pretty much what our week has been. Sam doing work projects, and Jess playing with the kids. I think its a toss up as to who is more tired. Sam installed our new skylight, put the rain covers over the vents, strung wire for the new internet antenna, and finished up the bike rack for the back of the truck. We also found and bought our final bike: a cyclocross! We are super excited about that. We visited Hale Center Theater in Orem for their production of Peter Pan, and Jess took the kids to the Discovery Children’s Museum in SLC for a fun day of play!
I was recently asked to write an article for Chic Magazine about travel photography. Coming from a lifestyle background, I decided to write about some tips and tricks to take better photos while on vacation and traveling (similar but not exactly like this blog post) titled “On the Road – Capturing Stories Through Travel Photography”. My landscape photo skills aren’t quite up to snuff, but throw a person in there and I’m golden.
You can check out the magazine and purchase a digital or print copy (there are some great articles by other amazing photographers!) here: http://chiccritiqueforum.com/issue10/
Chic Critique is also an amazing forum full of celebrity photographers, amateur photographers and other professionals. You can watch videos from the celebrities about all sorts of interesting topics from shooting to editing to client relations, post questions about photography related topics, and get lots of freebies! Check out their subscription options here.
We closed on the selling of our house last month and then promptly wrote out a rent check so we could stay and finish up some work projects and other commitments. Kind of strange to be renting our own house, but it worked out for the best so we can’t complain. Most importantly, we are mortgage free!! We all have mixed feelings about this: Cara is still insistent that we sell the Airstream and move the house to a campground; Rachel and Andrew will miss their friends and all the great memories we made. I will miss our garden and the flower beds I so painstakingly put together. Sam has had a great work space in the garage. We’ve definitely called this pile of brick & mortar our HOME. It will be missed. A lot.
At the same time, we look forward to new adventures. There are many reasons we made this decision, so I thought we could detail out the Top 10 Reasons Selling Our House and Almost Everything In It To Travel Full Time is Worth It. Ready? Here we go:
This is only advantageous if your are not a “nester”. Apparently we aren’t one house/one neighborhood kind of people. We like new and exciting places and don’t mind a continuous string of new experiences. My brother, on the other hand, loves to come home to his bed, his house, his normal life after a vacation. Totally fine, just not our style.
Once again, this definitely can have its up and downs. Generally its pretty up though. In the few short weeks we’ve been at the “Lehi house” (as my kids have dubbed it) I rarely see Sam. We get to the end of the day, and I feel like we haven’t spoken or seen each other at all. My kids are always off playing with friends and we just have less family time. It makes me sad as we’ve grown accustomed to being in each other’s space and we LIKE it. Crazy, right?
We couldn’t afford the real estate to give us this kind of acreage. Our backyard is ever changing, ever exciting. Mountains, beaches, desert, trees! We get to have it all, right outside our door. Yes, our house is small, but we try not to spend too much time in it anyway.
I can’t even begin to imagine the types of things our kids are learning without even realizing it. I imagine that years into the future we will still be reaping the benefits of their on the road education. Real life experiences in historical places, plant identification, geography, and just learning about our amazing country in general.
I have always been a tent camper. Growing up, we’d love to go spend time in the “great outdoors”. I still love it. Yes, its a little dirty, there’s generally some bugs, but how beautiful! We get to explore, admire, and travel in this beautiful land that our Heavenly Father created for us.
These have certain bragging rights. I love watching my kid’s hats fill up with shiny gold badges. Its so fun to see others’ responses when they wear them around the National Parks we visit. A lot of them take work (some are easy) and I’m super proud of my kids for working so hard to earn them.
We love visiting people! We have many college friends scattered all over the country, and its been fun to visit as we travel through. Between those friends, photography friends, and family we have plenty of people to see. Prior to traveling full time, we rarely made it to see many of them because of the logistical difficulty of getting there.
Even though they only get to play for a day or two, my kids are really good at making new friends. They waste very little time being shy, but rather they jump right in and start playing! I’ve also enjoyed the many people we’ve met in various campgrounds, National Parks, or other places.
Packing up our life into a small storage unit really has forced us to decide what’s important. Not just what kinds of things we want because they are convenient, but what we really can’t live without or replace. We also made the decision that spending time together and traveling is more important than dance class, or soccer, or any other activities our kids could currently be doing.
We’ve written about this before, but we can’t get complacent. I love it. I love being forced to choose every day what we are going to do. Yes, we still have the occasional lazy day, but those are few and far between. Most days we are intentional deciding where we want to go, what we want to see and how we want to spend our time.
We love traveling and the benefits its had on our family. We know its not forever, but we’ll enjoy it while it lasts!