Hello, and welcome to the new website+blog for our (my fiance Travis and I) possible upcoming journey.  While our journey is still not 100% happening, we are starting to more seriously plan for it rather than sit around staring at our PCs all day (although there is plenty of that too).

So here’s the rundown on what’s going on:

Travis and I are both unemployed; myself since I graduated last summer, and Travis only more recently.
The job market sucks right now.  California is expensive.

So with that said, we have several options:
1) Sit at home and apply to jobs (like we have been for the past few months); pay rent, do nothing.
2) Move somewhere with cheaper rent in CA, then continue with step 1).
3) Move out of state somewhere with cheaper rent/cost of living/income taxes/etc; then continue step 1).
OR
4) Put all our stuff in storage, and use our rent money to drive around the country (while continuing to apply for jobs and such as we go).

Needless to say, we’re leaning towards option 4).  I personally don’t think it’s realistic we’ll live cheaply enough to survive gas/rooms/camping/etc off of only our rent money, but for only a little bit more we can go out and explore the US, get some life experience, and see how well we function together trapped in a small vehicle for hours on end.  Not to mention this is likely to be one of the last times that both of are unemployed at the same time and don’t have strings tying us down to a particular location.

And so, we’ve started to prepare for our journey; we put in our 30 days notice at our current apartment, we’ve started “cleaning” (barely), and I’ve been hard at work trying to determine what I can bring for car entertainment which doesn’t take up lots of space.  Already Travis says I’m bringing too much stuff whenever I talk about what I need to occupy myself in the car.  On the bright side, since we have no real schedule or destinations, we don’t really have a need to spend long periods of time in the car anyday, since the main purpose of our trip is just to get out of Orange County and explore the rest of the US.

However, despite the freedom our trip should allow, I see a couple inhibiting factors already.  We plan to continue to apply to jobs during our trip, so we have a need for fairly reliable internet access.  Also, Travis wants to continue to trade stocks, which means we need the internet to be working for 1-2 hours at around stock market open and close, which means we do have to plan our travel times and stops somewhat around need of internet.  Oh well.

All and all, it should be an interesting journey, even if we don’t see much of the US it’s still a change of pace and different from the norm.  I really hope it happens!