This whole adventure started as a simple joke.  We’ve always been pretty busy people, filling up nearly every minute of every day with work and fun, but this last year, while fun-filled and exciting, was incredibly tiring and stressful.  Work and life were feeling too busy, and rather than living in the moment and enjoying each experience, my mind was often elsewhere, worrying about this or that, tabulating the big long to-do list of what needed to get done.  There were a lot of moments when we wished there were a big pause button that would give us time to reevaluate our lives- what exactly were we working towards and was it the trajectory we wanted to be on?

At the end of the night (or the wee hours of the morning) when we finally set our heads to our pillows, we’d contemplate hopping in the car and driving to a national park, one of our favorite activities together.  We’d hike, explore, clear our heads, and think about what we want from our lives before they pass us by.  And (of course!) we would get as many stamps as possible in our National Park Passport.

In fact, what if we spent an entire year visiting national parks and filling up our passport, from Acadia in Maine to the Badlands in South Dakota to Yosemite in California to Zion in Utah?  What an adventure that would be!  Last October, when we wrote our Ketubah (our marriage contract), we promised each other “an unpredictable adventure where we make the small things count and the big things matter.”  This sort of adventure would certainly fit that bill.

We started telling friends, family, and mentors about this crazy idea, and, instead of giving us reasons why we shouldn’t do it, they gave us more reasons why we should.  The end result- we both quit our day jobs. In May we did a trial run – three weeks away from home traveling from DC to NY to Boston, Acadia National Park in Maine, and Lewisburg, PA (among other places) before heading home to pack up our apartment in Capitol Hill (more on this trip in later blog posts).  We put the majority of our belongings into storage for a year, lent a few things out to friends, donated a bunch of stuff, and stored some things that didn’t quite fit in the storage unit in our friends’ basements (thanks Jen & Clint and Lenny & Christine!)

We purchased a 2008 Honda Element (our vehicle of choice for this trip) and outfitted it with a roof rack, cargo box, and some homemade wooden boxes/bed (shout-out to our friends Lenny, Christine, and Stevo who helped us build these over-engineered boxes).  We filled the Element up with our camping gear, cooking supplies, enough clothes for multiple seasons, some books/kindle, our laptops, hiking GPS, etc. etc…  In theory we have all of the items we will need for a year that fit in our car.

Our very loose plan is to visit national parks, catch up with friends old and new, see parts of the country that we have never been to, volunteer, and work on a solar financing start-up together.  We’ll stay in national parks (mostly camping and occasionally car camping), in Airbnbs and hotels from time to time, and with friends that want to host us when we are driving through.

We plan on blogging throughout our adventure.  We’ll also soon be accepting recommendations, whether it is a city we mustn’t miss, a restaurant with the best wings you have ever tasted, hidden gems in national parks, favorite libraries or coffee shops to work in, etc. etc… And if you want to meet up with us along the way, let us know!

You might be wondering, where have been since we left DC?  That’s a post for another day.  But I will say that this post was written while camping out in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, blogging from a yummy bakery – La Dolce Vita – in Bryson City, NC.

Signing off with some pics…