The Drive That Started It All

Well, we are only a few weeks out from beginning, what we have been so lovingly calling, our Epic Adventure. It was a year and half ago when we were driving to my parent's house for Christmas that the seed for this crazy idea was planted.

As is the case for many couples, long car rides, in this case the 500 km journey from Victoria to Port Hardy, seem to be a catalyst for in-depth discssion on rarely touched subjects. Maybe it is because you know the other person, apart from deploying the tuck-and-roll, has no where to go that encourages us to ask challenging, interesting, and life-changing questions: "Are we going to get married?", "What about kids, should we have them?", "Are we ever going to be able to afford to buy a house?", "Is this eat, sleep, work, repeat thing really what it's all about?". It is this last question that occupied most of our drive that day.

It was our first Christmas as a married couple, and we spent a lot of time talking about what our life might look like - knowing full well that life has a way of throwing curve balls at even the best laid plans. For us, it came down to blocking out the societal noise telling us all the things we should do (house, babies, work, sleep, eat, repeat) and focusing on spending our time and energy on things that bring us joy and fill us up. Though I suspect many days in our lives will blur together and follow similar patterns that don't vary much from one day to another, we weren't ready for that just yet. So, what do we do? For us, the answer was travel! We wanted to see the world and cherish each other's company while we still had some of our most precious and volatile assests: time and health.

When we got to my parents house that day, we told them that we were thinking of taking 6 months off work to travel. Their reaction couldn't have been better. Their faces lit up. They smiled and said, "That is an awesome idea!". This was unlike anything we had ever done before, and their support and encouragement was just the push we needed to step off of the "well-defined" path we had been travelling and embrace a once in a lifetime adventure. Needless to say, we spent our drive home from Christmas that year talking about all the places we could go...

In the year that followed, we created a virtual map that had us visitng almost every continent. It captured every place that we had every dreamed of visitng: Iceland, Tanzania, Peru, Scotland, Ireland, Bali, Vietnam, Nepal, Egypt, Thailand, Australia, ... We knew we would eventually have to narrow it down, but we could dream, right?

It is hard to believe that it has been a year and half since we first started talking about our Epic Adventure, and now we are 3 weeks away from flying to Iceland! Is this really happening?