A Year to Meander

Our New Year is off to a pretty quiet start. About halfway through our New Year's Eve dinner and party here at the park, Paul got whacked with a nasty cold bug. He's been pretty much horizontal since. But, I'm pleased to report he is feeling better.

All this quiet time has us thinking about where we've been and where we're going. To aid in this discussion, I've brought along a couple of visual aids.

This is an artist-who-shall-remain-nameless' rendering of our fulltiming travels to date. The routes may not be exact, but you get the idea. In the past year-and-a-half, we've been moving!

Some people call this "Vacation Mode." And, actually, we beg to differ. Sure, there was a little bit of that. But, we realized we weren't on vacation pretty early on, like somewhere in Oregon. What propelled us to keep moving and exploring was a thought in our collective subconscious that maybe, just maybe, we were only going to do this for a year or two. And, if you only have 12 to 24 months to explore the country you need to keep moving! We didn't want to miss a thing. As a result, we covered some serious ground in our first 18 months on the road. We have loved, loved, loved every minute of it. And, it has us thinking.

These days we're pretty sure we like this fulltiming gig. And, God willing, we plan to be at it for the next few years. With that kind of time on our hands, we're ready to take a different approach. We're going to slow down.

This is how we see 2011. It's a rough estimate, to be sure. But, we hope you get the idea. Instead of bouncing coast to coast and border to border, we're planning to embark on an extensive exploration of the Great Southwest. We'll leave our gorgeous spot in Hill Country in mid-February. We'll head west and take our time. We'll stay long enough to smell the cactus, roses or what have you. If it goes anything like this sketchy plan, we might just find ourselves next New Year's Day somewhere in Arkansas. In between, we're going to meander in just five or six states.

Meander. That's such a wonderful word. And, truth be told, we've yet to do just that.

In fact, for the first time in our fulltiming journey, there's no place we have to be at a certain time. And, we can't begin to tell you how good that feels!

So, with absolutely no deadlines, we look forward to this new chapter in our lives as fulltimers.

We can't wait to do some serious meandering!