Why?

It is funny. This little idea of quitting our jobs, renting our house out and spending a year traveling around the world started in August 2010. We were coming up on a one-year wedding anniversary and this was the first vacation we had taken as a couple since our honeymoon. And while the honeymoon was great, it was overshadowed by the recent diagnosis that Ham's mom had Stage 4 lung cancer. Most of the travel for the six months following that diagnosis (and our honeymoon) was to see Ham's family in the northeast. She died March 1st, 2010. (To see her blog, visit http://vickicancer.blogspot.com/).

So, in August, we went to Portland for a friend's wedding, rented a car and took a week to drive from Portland to Los Angeles. We stayed with friends, stayed in a great bed and breakfast, and camped. The sights along that route don't need detailed description here. Highlights included eating fresh dungeness crab in small fishing towns on the Oregon Coast, camping on cliffs in Big Sur overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and a sixty-foot scenic waterfall into the ocean. We figured it was a combination of not having to deal with daily work and household responsibilities and the sense of beauty and adventure we were surrounded in. Regardless of what it was, we really fell in love with each other. We remembered why we married each other in the emotional sense and not just the intellectual one, which we had both learned is a bit like a spotty cell phone connection. It goes in and out. We had such a great time that we began to discuss how to organize our lives to maximize these sorts of experiences.

And so we began to hatch up a plan to quit our jobs and travel the world for a year...