“Opportunities don’t often come along. So, when they do, you have to grab them.”
Audrey Hepburn
Today is the two-year anniversary of the day my family packed up our lives in a thirty-six foot trailer and left our home in California to travel across the United States for three months. Even typing that sentence out just now feels surreal, because I can’t quite believe it actually happened. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about that road trip; about how it changed me, how it changed my family, and what it taught me about the world.
Road-tripping across America has been a dream of mine since freshman year of high school. I remember sitting at a friend’s kitchen counter, sipping our lattes, dreaming and scheming about the future. That day, we decided to convert a van and travel from coast to coast after we graduated high school. We made a Pinterest board. We mapped our route. We began compiling a playlist. Over the years, our friendship grew apart and our plan fell through. But it didn’t fall away…not yet. Not for me.
The road that paved the way was long and complicated, but the stars were aligning long before we considered the trip. That year, my dad changed jobs and found a mobile position that allowed him to travel to visit his clients. My best friend happened to be moving back into the area, and was looking for someplace to stay. The trip came at a perfect time for our family; my older brother had just graduated college, my younger brother graduated high school, my two youngest siblings were homeschooled, and I had just finished my general ed classes with plans to transfer to my dream college in the spring.
There were so many changes happening, and it all felt like something was brewing up for an adventure, the way you wake up on a summer morning and feel the whisper of possibility in the cool breeze. Like anything could happen.
That “anything” began as a “what if” at the dinner table: what if we decided to travel for three months? Mom checked the calendar and sure enough, there was nothing super important happening in the fall. Over the next few months, we whittled down our possessions. Asked my best friend to housesit for us. The stars began aligning. By the time we bought a travel trailer, we stopped holding our breath and started to really make arrangements.
Impossible Dreams Come True
Looking back, the number one thing that this adventure taught me was that dreams really do come true. I realized that our God is bigger than imagination; He wants our dreams to be bigger than imagination too. Sometimes that can mean living a beautiful life right where you are, appreciating all that God has given you. But it’s important to remember that God gave you an imagination and big dreams so that you can reach for them. So that you can have a life rich with memories and adventures and beautiful moments.
I don’t believe in “manifestation,” exactly, but I do believe our thoughts shape our world in powerful ways. We achieve what we think is possible, whether it’s in life or love or travel. When you believe in your dreams, they happen. Until the summer of 2017, a “dream come true” always sounded like a fairytale to me. Life seemed to have a habit of being predictable. But if I learned anything from getting ready for our road trip across America, it’s this: dreams really do come true, and more often than you think.
It’s Not All Glamour and Granola
As we quickly discovered, when seven people live together in a thirty-six foot trailer, things can get rocky. Living on the road isn’t always Instagram-worthy pictures of a “glamping” site or Grand Canyon views. Most times, it’s nine hours of driving through cornfields in the midwest, or driving through the never-ending Mojave desert. It’s refilling the gas tank every other day. Making reservations for campsites while we’re on the road. Hooking up the water and sewage systems every single time we move. It’s walking on tip-toes across the trailer in the morning because it sways if you move too quickly. It’s “boondocking” (camping without hookups) because you can’t always afford a camping site. It’s gas station coffee, frozen food for dinner, and stopping for bathroom breaks, like, every hour (because apparently not everything can be coordinated).
I remember feeling overwhelmed with the lack of space, the literal rubbing shoulders of seven people trying to make lunch in the same ten square feet of kitchen, the irritation of being on someone else’s timeline when I’d packed my own projects into my schedule. No time alone, no one-on-one conversations. And the inevitable “herding cats” feeling of getting the night owls (aka the younger siblings) up and moving in the morning so we could actually go see the United States of America instead of just, you know, the campsites along the way.
Don’t get me wrong. This was still the biggest adventure of my life so far, remember? But even the best days of your life are still only days, with the same regularities of sunrise and sunset as bookends. Even when the sewer backs up and the car transmission fails. Even when New Jersey traffic almost kills you. Travel isn’t always picture-perfect, but it’s still worth the drive.
Learn Your Loves
My favorite aspect of running away on a road trip like this was that it allowed me to really get to know myself. To discover who I really am, apart from the place I grew up, and to discover who we are as a family. We were on the road most the time—usually with sketchy internet connection at best—and we withdrew from reality, from the race of life, even from society, in a sense. Every single day of our adventure had at least one exquisite moment—often dozens of them, gleaming like gems in the hours we spent together.
So what does life look like on the road? When my sole occupation was travel? As it turns out, the stuff you do on a ten hour car drive to pass the time will tell you a lot about yourself. I kept up a detailed journal of all our adventures, wrote the second novel of the trilogy I’m writing, and dreamed this blog into existence. I also filmed and edited twelve weekly travel videos for my family because I liked it — I liked the process of capturing moments and putting my life to music. It was frustrating, sure. There were times when my computer crashed, and I spent hours sorting through footage, painstakingly editing clips down to the second. But there was nothing so satisfying as returning home from a three month retreat with a portfolio of things I created and really had fun creating.
Go See the World, Not Your Perception of It
The world isn’t such a scary place once you’ve been out and seen it. Until we left, I never really imagined what it would be like to travel America, I just fancied the idea of it. The idea of thinking, “I’ve been there!” when I see a photo of Yellowstone National Park, the NYC skyline, or the original Starbucks at Pikes Place Market.
Whatever you expect from your destination, don’t let it cloud your experience when you’re actually there. Yes, Philly cheesesteaks are really incomparable. The Grand Canyon really will blow your mind. The fields of Gettysburg do feel altered by the battles that took place there. If the chance comes along to see those epic places, take it! But looking back now, my favorite memories were the simplest ones: stopping for pizza after a long day out on the river, driving down the freeway and watching the rain fall, going to a corner coffee house and watching everyone go about their daily lives. It’s all in the little moments.
Home Is Where Your Heart Is
Home is not a place. It’s not the house where you grew up. It’s not the bright lights of a distant city or the pastoral rolling hills of a countryside. Home is the people you love, the people you can be yourself around, the people who accept you and love you unconditionally. Your pack, your team, your family. You can make memories anywhere. It’s not the destination, but the company that matters.
As our three months waned to an end, I found myself missing my own space. I missed my floral notebooks, my own dearly-loved collection of books, my own room, the country roads that I walk in the evenings. But travel reminds me, again and again, that home is both everywhere and nowhere at once. This earth is not my home, but I love it all the more for the echoes it shows me of my true home.
When I remember all the places we’ve been—the colors of the sunset in a far away sky, the conversations we’ve shared across the continent, the laughter, the stories we gathered like lucky pennies along the way—I wonder how it can be that the more you learn about the world, the less you know. Someday I hope to write more about our travels. I want to write down every adventure I can remember, the shape of skies we’d never seen, the memories we made that bonded our family. But for now, the memory is enough.
We began this road trip by driving north, picking up adventures like lucky pennies, reborn in every new city we visited. Ninety-two days later, we drove down our driveway again completely changed. Our internal landscapes had altered to accommodate the greatness of the world we’d seen. Our adventure changed us. It changed our family.
But all those big adventures of our lives? They don’t feel big when you’re living them. That’s the beauty of it. They feel suspiciously like normal life.
<3 Olivia Grace
