Epic Trip 2015 – Part 1

In this galaxy and not very long ago…this is how this adventure all started…

Note: The time frame for the the Epic Trip 2015 is late April to early June 2015.

I’m sitting less than twenty feet from the river that is energetically snaking its way through this old mining town.  A couple of mule deer are grazing in a yard across the river.  The cool breeze is pushing the clouds over the mountain peaks that surround the town. I need to check on the kids.  I think they’re at the playground.  They’ve been gone for a while.  They’ll be okay.  It can wait. The morning horse ride was a success.  My wife, a city girl, loved it.  The kids didn’t want to get off their horses. I pick up my phone.  I should check my e-mail.  I put the phone back down.  It can wait.  I catch a scent of our afternoon fishing adventure.  I need to take a shower.  It can wait.  In fact, it all can wait.  With one exception.  The imminent return to the rat race of city life.  I don’t want to go back.  My wife doesn’t want to go back.  The kids love it here…as well as the eleven previous stops we’ve made on our “Epic RV Trip”.

This adventure, unknowingly, started in late 2013 when we began tent camping at Huntsville (TX) State Park with our kids and they loved it.  When camping they wanted to be outside exploring the world on their legs, bikes and scooters.  The electronic life of iPads, Xbox, and TV was a distant memory.  It was really a small miracle.  Within minutes of setting up camp a friendly and happy mob of kids had formed and their excitement was felt throughout the park.  A few months later we purchased a pop-up camper taking our camping experience to the next level.

In early 2014, my wife and I made the relatively easy decision to start home schooling our two children.  I know that you are probably thinking we are some weird religious zealots living on a farm.  I can assure you that we are as normal as normal can be.  Too normal, which was part of the problem.  There was nothing sinister that lead us to this decision, we simply felt, all things considered, this was a better fit for our lifestyle.  At the same time we made the homeschooling decision, I was leading a global IT department for a high growth company.  I was responsible for over 50 people on my team and several thousand customers (end users) that were seemingly never happy.  The hundreds of e-mails and dozens of phone calls a day were maddening.  In the previous two years my stress level went through the roof and I had gone from a finely tuned, multiple Ironman triathlon finisher to an overweight, forty-three year old borderline couch potato.  As we prepared for this homeschooling journey we discussed me leaving the corporate world and going back to my consulting life (I had a successfully consulting business before going to work for one of my clients in 2011, but that is a story for another day).   We wanted some balance in our lives and my wife and I both new that my job was ruining me.  I wasn’t the husband, father, or man that I wanted to be.  But before I dove headfirst back into the consulting business we had other plans. As we continued to plan for our homeschooling adventure we both felt that this was only part of what we needed to do.  Remember that I said we were normal.  We were leading a normal life.  An ordinary life.   Not that there is anything wrong with that, but we needed to do something epic.  Like Major Tom stepping through the door.  One morning, over a cup of coffee, we had an epiphany.  How about a month long RV trip? It was a done deal.  We had the courage of our convictions and once we have a goal we don’t stop.  We were doing this! A long decompression from the daily grind for my wife and me and a long social studies trip for all of us.

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