Getting Started

When getting started I find it’s best to start at the beginning. Kathy and I have been partners since 1998, and have been married since 2008. During that time we’ve traveled a lot by most people’s standards. I’ve driven across the country twice – the first time to move to California from Massachusetts with Kathy. And have driven from Southern California to Washington State and back too. We’ve taken numerous driving trips through Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and also Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. We’ve flown plenty also – although flying is not my favorite activity. Long story short, we’ve traveled.

Now the crazy thing about the amount of traveling we’ve done is that like most Americans it was all squeezed into a couple short weeks of vacation a year. Our typical vacation involves trying to see and do as much as humanly possible, so that by the end of the week we’re both so exhausted that we’re (almost) happy to go back to work on Monday.

This has always seemed brutal to me. There are so many places to go and things to see and do just in our home country – the awesome US of A – and I knew that I’d never get to see and do all of those things while working a ‘normal’ 9-5 job – let alone taking the time to explore other countries. There simply isn’t enough vacation time in the year – at least not to travel the way that I want to travel, which is to say in a much more relaxed way than we have been.

It was based on this that I concocted a plan and pitched it to Kathy. I figured that if we could create a mobile business that we could do anywhere, then we could simply travel all the time and work as we go. Now I can’t take credit for coming up with this idea on my own. In the beginning it was a little different. My original plan was to save up as much money as possible, then quit our jobs and do something cool for 6 months like hiking the Appalachian Trail. Of course at the end of the 6 months it would be back to the rat race.

It was after Kathy brought home Tim Ferris’s The 4 Hour Work Week that we modified the plan to both last longer and to involve a wider variety of travel. Kathy and I have spent the last year and a half both building a business and getting ready for travel. This was no small feat, but I’m happy to say that in 10 short days we’ll be on the road and on our way. How is this possible? I’ll run down the list in bullet points:

1. We don’t have children (Kathy’s are grown). Families with kids do travel, but it definitely increases the complexity level and cost.
2. I’m a web designer and affiliate marketer making a mobile internet business much easier.
3. Kathy is an excellent writer – perfect for working online.
4. We’re both risk takers. We moved to California with no money and no jobs, I’ve played several thousand hours of poker in the last several years as a side income, Kathy started several businesses before we met, etc…
5. We’re both a little bit crazy!

Now all of these attributes are certainly not necessary to do what we’re doing, but they are helpful.

Where Are We Going?

We decided to keep it simple on the first leg of our journey. Living in California we don’t get to see friends and family on the east coast very often. We have a friend that rents a condo in Orlando every fall and always asks if we’d like to visit and ‘do’ Disneyworld. We’ve never been to Disneyworld, so figured that Orlando would be a great first stop. We plan to see some of Kathy’s relatives in Phoenix, and also will stop at Carlsbad Caverns, San Antonio, and New Orleans on the way.

This trip has been a long time in the making, and I can’t wait to get started! Check back for more updates, as they will be coming soon. Thanks!