How We Got Where We're Going — Farther with the Farmers

Cameron and I both turned 40 last year. So, this adventure we’ve embarked on could very easily be seen as a mid-life crisis. And, maybe it is. The idea for it hatched in the months after those birthdays and was bandied around for a while. Crazy at first because it involved both of us quitting our jobs, which would have been hard for us to walk away from for very different reasons. Cameron’s job provided the financial underpinnings for our family and offered security and comfort, while my job gave me community and purpose beyond being a wife and mom.

Luckily, we didn’t have to make the decision to walk away from our jobs. The small business I worked for closed to transition to a new industry and Cameron’s job was eliminated as a part of a corporate restructuring. So, in early December 2018 we found ourselves both unemployed with two kids getting ready to turn 11 and 13 and we thought “why not?”. While it may sound pretentious or flippant, the honest to goodness reason we’re doing this trip is because we can. We realized we had the means and the time to offer our family this opportunity. We are very lucky that all the pieces fell into place to make this possible and that we have family and friends that supported the idea from the moment the words left our mouths.

We left this morning for an eight-week driving trip across the US that takes us through the Midwest and West, hitting seven National Parks along the way. We will be back home in Winston-Salem for two weeks in August and then leave for 3 days in Hawaii, 3 months in New Zealand, 4 days in Fiji, and 18 days in Australia. We’ll be back home by Christmas. We will homeschool the kids this fall and then they will re-enroll in school in January 2020 to finish out sixth and eighth grades. Once we settle back in North Carolina, Cameron and I will figure out what to do with the back half of our lives.

Until then, we will be using this blog to chronicle our trip and hope you check in every once in a while to say hi. Ada and Jackson are also writing their own blogs, which you can also find on this site. Many thanks to our creative friends that suggested names for this site, especially Patrick Patten who suggested Farther with the Farmers. Time to hop off the computer and enjoy the West Virginia mountains, en route to Cincinnati, our first stop of the summer.