Did I ever tell you about the time I took my life back? And other terrific stories…

That’s a loaded title, I know… I’m obviously promising a lot of great content with such a title and you’re wondering if I can deliver. I will certainly give it my best!

I should probably start by introducing myself. I’m Kaleigh.. A year ago, I might have introduced myself as a successful business owner, an aspiring sommelier, a.k.a. wine geek, a wife and a mother of three kids. If you had inquired further, I might have mentioned that I owned two restaurants with my husband, was responsible for 25 or more employees, worked 80 hours per week and rarely saw my kids. What I probably would not have told you, was that I was burned out, had started to resent my job and it’s demanding responsibilities and that I felt absolute guilt every time I missed one of my kid’s soccer games or plays or school fundraisers because I had to be at work. 

I could see my husband, Engjell, heading down this same path. We rarely talked about it though, because we were so busy and because we were so successful. This was what we had worked so hard for, wasn’t it? We had focused all of our time and energy into owning a successful business and were making money at it, great money, so who were we to complain? And then one day, we did talk about it. We each knew that the other person was feeling enormous stress and pressure as it was clearly taking a toll on our relationship, too. We talked about how fast our kids were growing up and how much we were missing by being at work and not at their games. We talked about how much we had come to resent our jobs, rather than enjoy them. We talked about what we could do to make a change.

Let me preface this next part by saying that both Engjell and I love to travel! He grew up in Eastern Europe and then moved to Rome as a young man. I met him there as a student abroad and had been backpacking around Europe and Northern Africa prior to moving to Rome. We moved to the U.S. after we had our daughter in 2005, looking to finish university and make something of ourselves. Well… we did make something of ourselves, I suppose. But in doing so, we had left many things behind, including our freedom to travel. We wanted to travel again and we wanted to do it with our kids… to show them the marvelous diversity that existed outside of the tiny place we called home.

Carl Jung once asked, “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” And so it is… What were we chasing? We had a successful business, enough money, a mortgage, two and a half kids… okay, three… and everything they tell you is the key to happiness. And yet, we weren’t happy. We were finding that having all of those “things” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Our kids were growing up without us and before we knew it, they would be off to college and we would be left with a pile of things, but only a handful of memories with our kids. 

The decision to sell everything we owned to travel full-time… the house, the cars, the restaurants, the furniture… wasn’t easy and the process wasn’t automatic. It took us almost two years to get everything sold and on the road, but once we made the decision and started to take steps toward achieving our goal, everything fell into place. There were a few times when we both felt that we had made the wrong choice, that giving up our comfortable way of life was a crazy decision. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t laying in bed, terrified, the night before we left for our big adventure. 

So let me introduce myself. I’m Kaleigh… I am a wife and a mother. I live in a motorhome and am traveling around the U.S. for one year with my family. The road is my home! I still love food and wine, but now I get to experience those things for pleasure, not for business. And if all of that wasn’t enough, I get to spend every day with my kids! Next year, our family plans to downsize to backpacks and travel for one year around the world. We plan to revisit places we love, like Rome, and to experience new places we have yet to fall in love with. We don’t have definitive plans for what comes next after our two years of travel are over, but neither do we feel pressed to make them. 

In just the few short months we have been on the road, I have come to realize that true wealth is the experience. It’s our first time at the beach together, it’s eating noodles in Little Tokyo in LA, it’s watching my kids make new friends on the road, it’s in the journey… And so I encourage you to rediscover what made the hours pass like minutes for you! Life is too short to spend it otherwise! Take your life back too! 

"Buy an RV," they said... "It'll be easy," they said...

    Actually, nobody lured us to the idea of living full-time in an RV with the promise that it would be easy. I made that part up. I’m not even sure what I was expecting, but the utopian version of RV life I had naively concocted in my daydreams is not even close. My Dad is one of the unluckiest people I know and one of his favorite sayings is, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” Science has yet to release this study, but I’m confident they will find bad luck to be a genetic inheritance… thank you, Dad!

Three weeks into what we were dubbing “the adventure of a lifetime”, our RV engine blew up and needed replacing. We were told the entire problem stemmed from careless mechanics on the part of the dealership where we had purchased our RV.  We were quoted $11,000 and a window of 3 weeks to a month to get our home on wheels back on the road. I’m not emoji savvy, but I think the appropriate emoji response is the poop emoji… (insert poop emoji here).

I’ve been an incurable optimist for the entirety of my life, but usually not without a good side order of realism to balance things out. This might be one of the biggest ways in which Engjell and I are different: he is a committed pessimist. He can name fifteen reasons why the glass is half empty when you only asked for ten. I think my reckless optimism drives him insane, but in the end, I like to think we balance each other’s personalities out. Naturally, our kids have no idea what the status of the proverbial glass really ought to be.

However, this first month of life on the road has challenged my “happy, go lucky” spirit much more than I ever anticipated. Every day, it seem like a different appliance is sounding its alarms or the batteries are dead or the heating won’t work. To be fair, some of the issues have stemmed from pure user error and our learning curve has been pretty steep, but just as many of the problems have been legitimate. All of a sudden, Engjell is the optimist, running around excitedly and grinning ear to ear, every time a new alarm goes off because he gets to fix something! I have never known anyone who loves to troubleshoot like Engjell does…. He’s in his element and I can tell this trip, despite the setbacks, makes him happy. 

Just as important, it makes my kids happy. In one short month, they went from barely being able to entertain themselves without a tech gadget to playing games requiring imagination and creativity for hours on end at the park. Just when I thought all was lost and my kids had sold their imaginations to the electronic devil, life on the road comes to the rescue!

So now I realize, it wasn’t that my optimism had vacated the premises… I just had a bad attitude. Embarking on a new and grand adventure was never going to be easy and I had no right to force my expectations of perfection on it. Ninety percent of happiness is perspective but I let myself forget that important detail for one long, excruciating month. A wise friend reminded me last week of the adage that “anything worth doing will rarely be easy”. If Engjell, the Grand Poobah of pessimists, can find something to smile about every time an alarm goes off, I sure as heck can find a way too. 

It becomes clearer every day: it’s not whether the glass is half empty or half full, the point is that it’s refillable. Cheers!