The Ultimate Road Trip: Marriage Edition – When Dreams Change

I’ve been working on this post in my head for months and avoiding writing it for just as long.

Everything and everyone is fine. We’re not getting divorced, having a baby, dying Truffles’ hair hot pink or anything else revolutionary. It’s just taken a lot to process all of the feelings. What do you do when you leave your “real (read: traditional) life” jobs, sell all your things, go on the road for years and wake up one day to “I’m not sure I want to do this anymore?”

The Backstory

As our faithful readers will know, we started blogging even before we started our 5-year, 50 state road trip and set out on January 1, 2018. I began adding in personalized posts about marriage and life on the road after about 6 months. I intended to write them every 6 months or so and did for a while. Then in 2021, I took a break from writing many posts on the blog at all to focus on a few things. We had some personal, family issues during that time as well, that we didn’t divulge as that’s beyond the scope of our own daily life and personal struggles on the road trip. In 2022, I rode across Iowa during RAGBRAI and the training leading up to it was… gnarly. There’s no other word for it. Then we went to Europe.

While we were in Europe our friends, Mark and Megan, joined us again, and this time with their teenaged children, L & B. I’ve taken trips with teens a bunch over the years, but always within their home country. This was my first time getting to spend time with teens outside of the country they live in, in this case the USA (the work I did was in the UK so it was outside the US, but in their own home country.)

I was transformed. I’ve always “known” that my passion is youth work, travel and combining those two things, but I hadn’t had the hands-on experience of it. We went to breakfast with them on the first day and I was overcome. I was so energized, my emotional cup was full and I knew that this was the thing that I was meant to do. We spent a week with them in England and France and I was able to hang out with L & B without their parents (even though they were in the city) and take them around. It was just… perfection. Not always easy, but perfect.

Meanwhile, Stephen went on a work adventure when we returned to the US while Truffles and I bummed around at home in VA and with my mom in NC. This isn’t the first of these trips he’s been on so it wasn’t a ground breaking experience for him. But when he returned and we jumped right back on the road to Pennsylvania (when a hurricane derailed our plans to NC at the last minute), something changed for him – beyond just jet lag and exhaustion.

Since we started the road trip, he’s been growing his own business through GCGalore, a gift card-related website and it takes up a good deal of his time. How do you solve a problem like Maria GCGalore? Well, the short answer is, you don’t. *Face Palm* I hope that one day this will be lucrative enough for Stephen to have a “Stephen” (doing some of the work that Stephen does 2 days a week for Frequent Miler), freeing up his time for other things. But that’s likely a long way off. Stephen enjoys the travel hacking work he does and he’s gotten really into the gift card deal and reselling world. It’s become clear over the years (gradually growing more pressing each year) that we need to stay in one place during peak “gift card deal season” (November-early December) and that if we had a home base, he could do a lot more with his goals and dreams in this area.

Yes, long time readers, you’re probably saying… “Wait, I thought the road trip was Stephen’s dream!?” And you’d be right. And I’ve been very happy (although I’m sometimes more vocal about being unhappy than I should be) to be on the road. He supported my dreams for the first 12 years of our marriage, moving around the UK, to California and then on to Thailand to help me achieve them.

What has become a challenge is what do you do when the dreamer doesn’t dream of the same dream anymore? What do you do when dreams change? Not only what do you do as the dreamer; but as the dream-adjacent partner?

The Problem – When Dreams Change

In October, while I was having a dry (non-alcohol) month, Stephen and I sat on the couch of our hotel room and he turns to me and says… “I don’t think I want to do this anymore.” Not being able to cloud my thinking (read: drown my sorrows in wine) meant I had excellent questions (if I do say so myself) and we were able to explore his thoughts more. “This” being the road trip, moving every 7-10 days, constantly researching our accommodation options, going out to learn new things several days a week while working 2 days a week for Frequent Miler and all hours in the middle of the night on GC Galore. December 31, 2022 was supposed to be the final night of our 5 year, 50 state road trip, but due to the road trip taking longer than expected we’d only be at 30 states completed. It was a tempting, nice round number, to stop on.

At the end of 2021 we’d already decided that we were 4 years and 25 states in, so we’d have to extend the road trip by 4 more years, making it an 8-year, 50 state road trip. So, the question became (again!), is this a 5 year OR 50 state road trip? I asked Stephen how he’d feel if we didn’t finish all 50 states. I have the personality of someone who needs to finish what they start (one way or another) or it feels like I’ve failed. I didn’t say this was a good part of my personality and it’s something I regularly work on. Therefore, I already knew how I felt about it. Come heck or high water I was going to finish this road trip or die trying. I was going to help Stephen achieve his road trip dream. I’m not a “go with the flow, you’re doing this for now, then you do that,” kind of person.

That being said, I’m also very driven towards my own dreams (and happiness – I’m a solid Enneagram 7 if you didn’t know already. If you don’t believe in that stuff that’s fine, but if you read it you’ll see that it’s true in my case), so I was already brainstorming how I could travel with teens while on the road trip supporting Stephen’s dreams. I’d reached out to close personal friends with teens and tweens to see if they’d be interested in me taking their children on a trip in 2023. For most it was a resounding YES! I’d also been researching and toying with the idea of applying to work for a teen travel company for almost a year but hadn’t pulled the trigger on it.

Back to the hotel room in October 2022. We talked over the course of the weekend. We walked Truffles, enjoyed the weather, rested and talked some more. Ultimately, we came to a few conclusions.

• We’d both feel disappointed if we didn’t finish all 50 states.
• We both weren’t excited about at least 1/3+ of our remaining states – sorry Missouri and Indiana!
• I needed to try and travel with teens sooner than later to feel fulfilled and keep my mental health good.
• Stephen needed to have a home base to go back to after the road trip ended – no more transient life, at least for a while. This also needs to have good places for him to grow his gift card deal and reselling business.

Conclusion

We’re finishing the road trip early by speeding up some less exciting (to us) states

With all of these thoughts in mind here’s where we’re at – this is now a 7- year, 50 state road trip. We’re speeding up, not slowing down, to complete ~13 states this year and ~7 next year (while still going to the Maldives for our 20th wedding anniversary in 2024.) So far we’re doing pretty well, having ticked off North Carolina and Arkansas already. We’re on to three weeks in Missouri today. Will we see every amazing thing in the state like we set out to do originally? No. This had to adjust – we’re just hitting the highlights, particularly highlights we’re actually interested in – sorry Branson, MO – rather than trying to be within 2 hours of every location in a state.

We’re having a little trouble fitting in Indiana but it will be there. Things are constantly changing as Stephen books our accommodation. Currently we’re due to hit Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan and New York before his parents come to visit from the UK for another month to see the fall leaves in New England. Next year we have Florida, Alaska, Montana and Hawaii on the list (to name a few.)

Edit: As of 6/23 Shae will not be traveling away from the NHJR team this summer

Shae will be traveling away from Stephen and Truffles while they continue the road trip

I’ve applied for, and accepted, a position with an teen travel organization. I love their ethos – be a traveler, not a tourist – and I’m excited about my travel plans for the summer. I have other plans and goals with teen travel, but for now this is my next step. I told them I had a pretty open schedule, without realizing that they’d take me at my word! (Oops, haha!) So I received my assignments for the summer of 2023.

We won’t be going on to another nomadic adventure immediately after finishing the road trip

This final decision is still a work in progress. We have no idea where we’ll end up after the road trip. We just know that we won’t be jumping into another road trip in Canada, Europe, the UK or Australia, like we’ve often discussed. We also won’t have a few properties in the US that we move between every few months, which we’ve also discussed a lot.

We’ll have some sort of a home base near stores that provide opportunities for Stephen to grow his business and *probably* near a decent airport for our personal travels and my work travels . We want a nice yard for Truffles to play ball. We have some location ideas in mind, but are still in the discussion phase of where that might be. Considerations beyond the airport, stores and Truffles’ happiness include weather, walkability, quality of life in the location, affordability, the possibility of accessing grants/money for digital nomads to live in a location, etc.

Stephen and I will still be traveling. We’ll just be flying places and going on weekend or week-long adventures from a home base to start with – you know, like normal people. After 7 years of moving every 7-10 days we’ll be ready for a break. We plan to still blog, although the frequency will likely change, as we’d named this “No Home Just Roam” rather than “Our 50 State Road Trip” for a reason. Besides, Nomadic Matt proved you can build a brand as “nomadic,” then have a home base sometimes.

Where should we end up based on our criteria? Drop your thoughts in the comments.