We are in our 5th year of living full-time in our RV. When we started in March 2018, it was the desire of our hearts to drive our truck camper from Alaska to Argentina. But it hasn’t been simple.
In fact, at times we have felt as though we should just give up, sell our RV and find someplace to settle down to live what others would call a “normal life.”
But we feel as though we are called to the journey, not necessarily the destination.
When we hit the road in March 2018 we were naive about life on the road. In fact, there was a steep (and costly) learning curve. We didn’t know how to live in such small quarters.
We weren’t mechanically inclined enough to fix our truck or camper should they break down.And we didn’t have nearly enough money to support us throughout the duration of what we knew would be a multi-year journey.
But we did feel called – both to serve the people we knew that we would meet on the road and to better understand ourselves through our belief that we were created to make an ordinary life far less ordinary.
Origins Of A Dream
In 2016 we had the vision to drive from Alaska to Argentina. It is really something we can’t quite explain. We just felt a calling in our hearts to go. And we trusted that we would figure out more about our calling once we got on the road.
At the time we worked for an organization fostering 8 children in a group home. We also owned a 40-year old fixer-upper sailboat that we thought would take us somewhere. So when the desire to drive from Alaska to Argentina hit us, we didn’t know anything about what the journey would entail.
Yet we were inspired by the idea that we might complete the drive one day. We felt it was part of our destiny.
Pursuing A Dream
We left Florida in March 2018 full of optimism for our journey. At the time we had created a 49-state route, which we called our giving trip.
Our goal was to connect with and serve at least one family in each state as we learned to live on the road and hopefully slingshot ourselves southward with mighty momentum! We had confidence that completion of this portion of our journey would propel us forward into Mexico on the route south toward Argentina.
It was ambitious and naive. And we realized within two weeks that we were going to have a difficult time fulfilling this mission. Between awful weather forcing us to change our itinerary, broken items in the camper and difficulty connecting with people in each state, we became disillusioned at our giving trip.
We ended up in Las Vegas, of all places, in April because we were sick and needed to have a few items shipped to us. There met an awesome couple who immediately became a part of our story and helped us see that our mission to serve others could not be forced.
Serving others had to be more spontaneous.
Additionally, we realized that our vision was not to visit all 50 states. Our journey was to Alaska, and from there, toward Argentina.
We realized then that it was time to head north.
Driving Toward The Dream
When we left Las Vegas we knew we were headed toward Alaska. But for a couple of Floridians, it was still too early (aka – “cold”!) to head too far north.
So we meandered through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon and Washington before making our crossing into Canada. After a week of exploring Revelstoke, Banff and Jasper National Parks we made our final turn north toward Alaska.
We left Dawson Creek, British Columbia on a cold, rainy day at the end of June. Following the Alaska Highway (Alcan Highway) for over a thousand miles, we crossed into Alaska on Lindsay’s 32nd birthday. Two days later and we were headed still further north along the infamous Dalton Highway.
On July 5, 2018, we reached the top of the world. Standing in the Arctic Ocean in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska we looked on toward the North Pole.
Then we turned and faced south. Argentina was just over 14,000 miles away, as the crow flies. But we wouldn’t drive as fast or as straight as the crow.
We learned in Alaska that life is about the journey, not the destination.
This would be an important lesson because our journey to Argentina was not going to take place the way we thought it would.
Realizing The Dream
In leaving Alaska we were ready for anything. Alaska opened up our eyes to the possibilities in life. We always wanted to pursue the Abundant Life. Now we were in the midst of it.
As we drove south out of Alaska we met the experience with bittersweet acceptance. We had reached Alaska, where we thought our dream of driving to Argentina would begin.
But in leaving Alaska we realized that we were already living the dream. Nothing had changed in our circumstances.
- Lindsay still had Crohn’s Disease.
- Our truck still had incredibly high mileage and was still prone to breakdowns.
- We still had not figured out how to earn money on the road.
But we had the passion and the confidence that our dream was divinely inspired. We came to see our life as the journey we were always afraid to make.
Now we were fully alive, reconditioned to accept that wherever we were is where we were supposed to be.
Living the Dream
We knew before we reached Alaska that we were in love with the road. And in leaving Alaska in our first few months on the road we felt like something in us had changed. We realized that our journey, wherever we went, was life and that we were addicted to life on the road.
We ended up in some crazy situations – a near catastrophic breakdown, several months of battling ecoli and the pandemic – but through it all we kept our eyes on the road.
In 2021, like most of the world, we decided to table our dreams of driving from Alaska to Argentina. We had clocked tens of thousands of miles in the US and Baja, Mexico in a vortex of sorts, thinking that at some point the vortex would throw us out and we’d end up in Guatemala or Belize on our way south again.
But that hasn’t happened. We’ve found ourselves quite content, for the time being, to spend time exploring our home country, and beautiful parts of the Baja peninsula.
We’re now living the dream, one day at a time, out on the road. We work hard to keep it going. And we’ve allowed ourselves to start thinking about Argentina again, which we hope to visit one day…
