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Live Your Road Trip DreamTravel for a year for the cost of staying home
Make it your trip
Small trips versus one big trip
As we learned, there are real financial advantages to doing one long trip. Freeing up your income stream to spend on the trip is a necessary part of the planning for most people. Some of the strategies we employed wouldn't be available if you were taking a series of shorter excursions. Then there is the whole idea of planning and actually getting out of the house. After you’ve read the book, I think you will agree that you don't really want to go through this amount of detail more than once! If you do decide that a series of trips is the way to go for you, then we would strongly encourage you to plan them all at once -- and then stick to your schedule. Can this be done in a series of trips? Absolutely. Will you gain the same benefits we found from taking one long trip? Probably not. Be a kid again
We had done enough planning that we really could let most things happen on "autopilot” and we could explore, experiment, and try new things every day. Once we got the rhythm of being on the road, we could feel our curiosity begin to creep out of someplace deep inside us. We were less inhibited -- we'd strike up conversations with people almost anywhere and stop to look at something "just because.” We also found new perspectives about the way things are in this country. There is no doubt that in some way you will come back from this experience a different person from the one who left.
By now, you are most likely beginning to formulate your own ideas of how this could work for you--what your trip could include. But the nagging voices are already talking to you -- the roadblocks are beginning. Acknowledge them as items that you will have to address and work through. Do not let them become reasons to forget the whole idea. You can make it happen. We'll show you how. The rest is up to you. (Excerpted from Live Your Road Trip Dream: Travel for a year for the cost of staying home, RLI Press, July, 2004, www.roadtripdream.com, pictures by Carol White) |
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TM
It’s early January. It’s raining out -- what else in
Oregon? -- and I am sitting down with a cup of coffee to pay the bills. I
come upon a renewal notice for “Golf for Women” and mechanically begin to
write out the check. “Wait!” my subconscious says to me, “why are you doing
that? You won’t be here to read it! You’re going on a yearlong trip,
remember?” And so the serious decision making of preparing for “The Trip”
begins. At first the tasks seemed almost overwhelming. So many things to
think about—it’s enough to make you cancel the whole idea before you get
started! With that first small step of not renewing subscriptions came a
torrent of activities.
Everyone has dreams. What we hope to do is to help you
turn your dream into reality. Not our dream--your dream. What we did on our
trip is not really important. How we went about it can help you turn your
vision of the perfect trip into your reality. Everyone has issues and
concerns that make them drag their feet. The difference between whether you
can make it happen or whether you can’t is not how many obstacles you have,
it is how badly to you want to do something totally life-changing -- totally
for yourself. We will give you the tools to change your dream into reality,
but the rest is up to you. Our hope is to get you off the couch and
believing that you too can do this. 
One thing you may be asking yourself is, "Do we really
need to commit a year to this? Couldn't we just do a bunch of smaller
trips?" And of course, the answer is yes. But there are several really good
reasons to consider one larger trip -- and whether it is a full year or not
depends on what you want to accomplish.
Finally, the factor that we feel speaks the loudest to
doing it in one long sweep is the "kid" factor. How long has it been since
you could basically leave your responsibilities behind and focus on just
doing what you want to do? Only a trip of extended length can allow you to
be that kid inside again. Before we left, we had no concept of how freeing
this would be. 
Related to the whole idea of freeing yourself to
experience the trip fully is the notion of focus. If this is just an
extended vacation of sorts, you will not truly "leave it all behind.” You
will make compromises with yourself -- "Oh, I can handle that, I don't need
to make arrangements for this to be taken care of" -- and pretty soon, you
will be focusing on home obligations and not fully on experiencing your trip
of a lifetime. You will inevitably have to take some of your life with you,
but minimize that in order to focus on yourself.
Although our vision for our great adventure focused on
the United States, the techniques we learned could be applied equally well
to a trip in a foreign country or an around the world sailboat trip. The
choice is yours, and the planning is basically the same – just some of the
details will vary.