Looking for the Silver Linings

I love to find the silver lining in things. In 8th grade I broke my ankle playing basketball (by myself; a story for another day) so I got my mom to go trick or treating for me. Imagine a nearly 50 year old woman with a pillow case rolling around a suburban neighborhood eliciting candy from the neighbors. I actually think she enjoyed doing it.

Or the time I was in Switzerland for work and got lost about 2 hours from my hotel, my phone died, and a rainstorm descended onto me drenching me so thoroughly in just a few minutes that when I ducked into a museum completely drenched, it took me a minute to realize I was looking at the world’s largest taxidermy White Shark (sidenote: I feel like “taxidermied” should be a word. It is not).

I suppose my greatest example of turning bad into good is with the COVID outbreak in 2020 / 2021. At the beginning of COVID in March of 2020, we did what most people did. We hunkered the fuck down. I was already a remote worker. My team and I went full asynchronous back in 2018 when we moved to Seattle. My wife works for A BIG ASS TECH COMPANY and they went remote as well. Our kids, 1 and 3 at the time, came home for the next 2 months. All four of us in our house 24/7. It was….less than awesome. But after a few months, the kids went back to daycare and BIG TECH COMPANY started talking about bringing people back to the office. COVID was over YAAAAY.

Except it wasn’t. The second wave hit, the kids started to play COVID roulette at school, and we began to contemplate how much it was gonna suck to be indoors for the entirety of the Seattle winter. At the end of September of 2020, my wife came to me with a brilliant idea that I initially resisted: “what if we leave Seattle for a month? Like, say, November?”

“Whoa, a whole month?”

“Yeah!” she said. Our marriage is built around a simple construct: Megan has the good ideas. I voice initial hesitation and then say “OK LET’S DO IT!”. This was no different. After about 10 minutes of saying “this is gonna be hard and weird and how are we gonna work and watch the kids omggggggg” we decided to pull the trigger. We rented a house in Palm Springs for the month of November. Megan’s sister and two teenage boys joined us, renting a house about a mile away. We drove down to Palm Springs for the month and had an amazing time. The day we got back to Seattle in December, we started thinking of a longer, more ambitious trip.

The idea for the nearly four month sojourn was born within a week of returning home.

From March ‘21 to July ‘21 we drove over 9,000 miles covering 9 states, 10 different AirBnbs / rentals, 8 national parks, and countless nights wondering if our kids would actually go to sleep. We did all of this while watching our children (with some help from occasional baby sitters and summer camps) and working two full time jobs. It was an exhausting, amazing, challenging, and life changing trip.

As I sit back and think back on our time on the road, I realize how fortunate we were to be able to do this. But I also realize how well served we were by our “fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen” attitude (we could lose our kids in a condo complex, that’s the worst that could happen. More on that later).

My parents never had the financial security to pull off a trip like this. My dad, a restaurant / retail guy (you name a theme restaurant from the 80s and he probably worked there. And Radio Shack. He did that too) and my mom a secretary / transcriptionist / bus driver / stay at home mom are of a generation where a roadtrip always involved a beach and maybe a few stops at McDonalds if you were lucky. The trips were in a classic American Station wagon with the kids piled in everywhere, no car seats, maybe some seat belts, and lots of siblings smacking the shit out of each other. Remote work hadn’t been invented yet so a good vacation (which we took every 4 or 5 years) lasted a full week. In the in between years a trip would last a long weekend.

COVID + easy access to Internet changed this dynamic. Instead of these 6 day trips in the family station wagon, we can now take our work with us. Instead of putting on the out of office assistant and coming back to an avalanche of email, we can now stay plugged in AND venture out on the road. In our case, you can venture all over the Western US on a nearly 4 month excursion — with 2 kids under the age of 5.

Surviving the trip feels like we landed someone on the Moon. It’s the kind of trip I always dreamt of doing before I had kids. Showing them the west. Letting them climb boulders. Falling down and skinning their knees (repeatedly) as they learned to ride bikes and scooters. Sticking their feet in the Great Salt Lake. Finding really (really) random shit to entertain us — like the World Famous Crochet Museum in Joshua Tree. Eating countless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on park benches in random towns. The experience for us and our kids was unlike anything I’ve had in my nearly 44 years.

The next 10 or so chapters are a collection of travelogues, stories, pictures, what to do / not do, and things we needed to survive 112 days as a family of four with nothing more than what we could fit in a Subaru Forrester. Enjoy!