Our 2013 Travel Route

Our past maps & wrap-ups :  2007, 2008, 2009 , 2010, 2011 and 2012

2013 will go down in our personal history as one with a lot of major life milestones and challenges navigated.

We started the year off with an awesome convergence with many of our NuRVer friends in Cedar Key, Florida.

But even before the first sunrise of 2013, we were presented with our first major obstacle for the year by learning that the government contract for a major software system our family wrote would be awarded to another contractor under a special program we didn’t quality for. It was heartbreaking after spending nearly a year getting all our ducks in a row to bid on the contract again and adjust for my father’s retirement with new staffing.

Just a couple weeks later, we got the even worse news that my father’s cancer had shifted from a chronic long term disease to terminal.

Looking back, January was an extraordinarily tough month for us, and we are ever so thankful to have been able to ride it out with friends to comfort us.

We shifted our plans for the year to relocate near my parents in Melbourne, Florida to be nearby to help out and soak in the precious quality time we had left.

My dad’s 6-month prognosis rapidly shifted to a way too short 6 weeks right before our eyes and we mustered up the courage to escort him onto Eternal Patrol.

In April we helped my mother navigate all the logistics as we all entered the grieving process.

We focused some of our energy into publishing The Mobile Internet Handbook, which apparently satisfied a need for many. Thank you to all who have supported our first self-published book by purchasing and/or helping spread the word!

We also joined my mom on a road trip to Connecticut to spread my dad’s ashes around the lighthouse they got engaged at back in 1970.

From there, Chris and I planned to spend the summer fully transitioning all of the clients my father and I served together to new contractors, and to then shut down the family business. No small task – and aside from the emotional significance of the situation, it would also result in stripping away our major income source.

We optimistically attempted to do this while making a cross country repositioning following the Lewis & Clark trail, with a goal of attending the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. We also had made plans to volunteer host an Oregon lighthouse for the month of July.

All this was pre-empted by our engine overheating in the middle of nowhere Montana, leading us to 7-weeks of living in a diesel shop parking lot while we apprenticed on our engine having a complete out of frame rebuild at Interstate PowerSystems in Billings, MT.

It wasn’t necessarily the salt we wanted rubbed into our fresh wounds, but we made the best of the situation… chanting my dad’s motto of ‘Always Positive’ regularly. Our crew at Interstate because like family to us, which made things easier to swallow. And we got a lot of other bus projects completed while we had access to a whole shop full of tools.

In mid-August we were sprung free and back on the road, and an invitation was extended for us to pick up a volunteer host position at Cape Blanco Lighthouse for September.

The timing had the extra bonus that we’d finally get to not only meet Nina & Paul of Wheeling It (a long time mutual RVing blog crush), we’d get to be co-hosts and neighbors for a month.

The entire experience was soothing, perfect and connective. And exactly what we needed to recharge from the intensity of the year so far.

After the lighthouse experience, we spent a couple weeks in Sacramento attending to the long overdue chore of completely clearing out Chris’ storage unit which we hadn’t been able to return to in years. It was another intense experience, but it’s done with and that’s $144/month back in our pockets and a huge weight off our shoulders.

We then rendezvoused with Nina & Paul again in Desert Hot Springs for a week of soaking in hot water and continuing to build our friendship while plotting lots of future mischief together.

With our eyes on bringing in the New Year in Cedar Key surrounded by our RVing friends, we completed our circle around the country to the same exact spot this intense year began.

We do so as a symbolic gesture that while we won’t forget the experiences learned this year, we won’t be detoured either. We faced the challenges presented us throughout the year, and we not only survived – we thrived.

Apparently navigating challenges is good reading that has resulted in doubling our blog traffic this year to nearly a 1/2 million (?!?) unique visitors. It boggles our minds how many of you choose to virtually follow along and it can be a bit intimidating sometimes. We never started out to be ‘bloggers’, we really just wanted to keep our parents from calling in every night to make sure we made it into our next destination safely. 

We thank each and every one of you for virtually joining us on our adventures, and we are especially grateful for how many new friendships we’ve been able to forge from all these connections.

In 2013, we drove the bus 7,518 miles (120 of those being hauled on a flat bed wrecker) – bringing our cumulative nomadic RVing mileage to 73,795.

We are more than ready to bid 2013 adieu and embrace 2014 with an attitude of abundance – great things are ahead of us! We hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride.