Growing up in the UK, I loved watching a TV show called Record Breakers.
People would try to break all kinds of weird and wonderful records. The record attempts ranged from tap dancing to drum playing to rolling a kayak 100 times.
Not to mention that the presenter Roy Castle was an absolute legend (RIP Roy).
Fast forward to 2016 and my parents came from the UK to the US to visit us for a few weeks. While they were here, Shae and I told them all about our plans for what was, at that point, our upcoming 5 year, 50 state road trip.
A couple of months later, my Dad forwarded me an article he’d just read about a couple who’d set a world record for the longest road trip in one country. They’d traveled over 29,500 miles, an amount we’ll smash within 18 months, let alone over the course of 5 years.
This meant one thing.
We could be Record Breakers!
OK, so we wouldn’t be on the TV show, but we’d still get to be Guinness World Record holders – a childhood dream come true.
So I started researching what we’d need to do in order to gain the record. I began completing an application at Guinness World Records, when all of a sudden it screeched to a stop because of…
The Rules
Before submitting the application, it gave a list of the rules for how to break a ‘longest journey’ record. In theory, we could complete all the requirements, but here’s the thing.
I didn’t want to.
Becoming a record breaker would’ve been awesome, but it wasn’t the purpose of our road trip. There are three reasons we’re doing what we’re doing:
- Travel
- Write
- Encourage and help others to travel more
Trying to break the world record would have a negative impact on all these aims:
Travel – It’d restrict our travel due to some of the stipulations about allowable journeys and how long you can stay in one place. Although we’re not planning on spending much more than a week in one location in most cases, in some smaller states we might want to set up shop in one central location for a month and travel around from there. We couldn’t do that if we weren’t allowed to stay in one place for more than 14 days. We’d also like the flexibility to travel overseas if we want, like driving to Canada for Woofstock.
Write – Writing this blog can be time-consuming, so having to collect witnesses, complete log books, track GPS coordinates, etc. would take away time from being able to create helpful and interesting content.
Encourage and help others to travel more – I write this blog and post photos to Instagram and Facebook to give you inspiration about places to visit. When readers email me with questions, I try to provide as much information as I can. Focusing on breaking the world record would reduce the time I have to do this.
OK, so breaking the world record would have a detrimental impact on all three of these aims, but there’s an additional reason I decided not to try breaking the record…
It would be a job.
I have no problem with working hard. In fact, it often feels like I’m working even harder on this road trip than ever before. But there’s a distinction.
This blog is something I love writing. Helping people travel more is something I love doing which is why I also enjoy writing for Frequent Miler. Both involve work and effort, but they’re incredibly fun and intensely rewarding. They’re not something I have to do – they’re something I want to do. They bring joy to my life.
Breaking the world record would be a nice achievement, but it wouldn’t be fun to achieve. It would be a chore. Completing the requirements every day would feel like a job. And I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t want to do something I don’t enjoy unless it’ll actually help me achieve an aim.
So no world record for us, but we’re enjoying the road trip much more by not trying to pursue it. Besides, we already got to help break a world record back in 2010 for the largest gathering of people wearing a Snuggie, so we’ll always have that ;).
Question
If you could break a world record, what would you like it to be? Let us know in the comments below.
Leave a Reply