Preparation Begins

Today is January 1, 2016- New Year's Day. Our family thought it an excellent time to make the official announcement that we've decided to embark on an epic family adventure!

Starting at the end of June we will be leaving for 14 months of travel around North America!

“How is this possible?!” you may ask. Surprisingly, the logistics couldn’t have come together more beautifully. We plan to homeschool (roadschool, actually) our three children (14, 12 and 9) and my husband will work remotely. The timing is perfect because our kids are old enough to remember and participate, yet young enough to be free of the ties of life they’ll experience in just a few years. We will live in different states for approximately two month periods in order to rest and fully experience each location. As you can imagine, that kind of a life shift will take quite a bit of planning and preparation but we are excited to get started!

Goals:

1. To experience the many regions, climates, terrains, languages, foods, people, histories, arts, etc. that our beautiful continent offers.

2. To reconnect with long-unseen family and friends and give our children an experience that will stay with them for a lifetime. (I mean, really, what better way to connect with what you're learning about than to experience it for yourself?!) We welcome any suggestions along the way to help us plan.

Route (as it stands today):

1. Alaska
2. Idaho/Wyoming
3. Arizona
4. Florida
5. Maine
6. Somewhere in the middle ending with the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse
7. Return home before the 2017-2018 school year

While in each location, we will be exploring surrounding states and areas as time permits.

Our kids are at the ages where their lives revolve around friends and trends, so we decided to create this blog so you can all follow along. The kids will be checking in with their own perspectives from time to time and we expect that they will have many experiences and opinions to share. Our plan is to check in at least once a week (Hey! A New Year's resolution!) so be sure to sign up for updates or bookmark this blog to stay current.

In the meantime, we are in the throws of preparation. We are thinking about things like storing everything we plan to keep after we return, getting our house ready to rent, deciding what we will need for a year and what we can live without. I suspect we'll surprise ourselves with how little we actually *need*.

We look forward to planning this trip and traveling with you.

Welcome to our adventure!

- Jen