I don’t know when I was going to write about our upcoming trip to Latin America, but I have been spending the morning reading other people’s travel blogs to Mexico, Central, and South America and I am getting so excited! So I guess I will spill the beans… David and I are planning on a year-ish long trip to South America and back!

We’ve always wanted to do some kind of adventurous long trip, but as we’ve gotten older and more established it’s felt like more of a distant dream. It wasn’t until a couple of months ago when David brought up the idea of selling everything and travelling for a year. At first I was skeptical of his enthusiasm. We’ve entertained ideas like this before, but in the end nothing ever came of it. But this time was different, David was really serious about doing it. He begged the question for weeks. I always have fun entertaining the idea… how fun would it be to go travel, it’s my favorite thing! This time I realized he was very serious about the idea.

“I was secretly hoping David would get over his itch…”

As much as I love to travel, to be honest, I was secretly hoping David would get over his itch to jump ship and travel the world. We’ve been planning on having kids soon, we’re both doing well in our careers, and we were probably going to buy a house in a year. And as much as I would love to travel for a year, I was getting used to our routine of a ten day trip once a year mixed with sprinkles of little trips in our free time. But David didn’t get over the idea, and then I started to really give it some serious thought. That’s when the idea blossomed for me. I started thinking about where I would want to go. I’ve always wanted to go to South America. I started looking at pictures of places we would go. I also started looking at guns that we could take with us to go hunting in South America, Click Here to see the scope I got for my gun. With a year, we could see ALL of them. I was getting excited. I still had my reservations, but now I wanted this trip too!

We decided we would live out of a car and drive to South America. We learned this form of travel is called overlanding. The idea to travel for a year was born in February. It’s been 8 weeks since then, and during that time we have: bought a Toyota Landcruiser, swapped out its engine for a new one, subscribed to Rosetta Stone, picked the major places we want to go, planned out a route, and set out a timeline. There’s so many other things left to do before we leave like: turn the Landcruiser into our home on wheels, get our medical stuff in gear like immunizations and Lasix, get Moby’s stuff in order, buy international health and auto insurance, sell all of our stuff including the cars, decide what we want to keep, sort out the important details of the trip like shipping the car from Panama to Colombia, make a budget, buy whatever gear we need, and so many other things we’re probably missing. At times it gets overwhelming because we still both work full time, David is in the beginning stages of launching an app he’s been developing for nearly four years now, the car needs a lot of work before it’s live in ready, this will be our first overlanding experience (albeit in some third world countries), we don’t speak Spanish, and we only have 18 weeks left before we hit the road.

“I’m excited for that to be our life, even if only for a year.”

But with all those worries nagging our thoughts and occasional doubts, we’re still determined to do it. That’s why this morning, it’s been really fun reading blog posts from other couples who are doing what we will be doing. All the beautiful places they’ve seen, their wild adventures and days of nothing planned but relaxing on the beach. I’m excited for that to be our life, even if only for a year. It’s hard to imagine this will be us when I’m getting ready for work, paying rent, or watching Netflix in our comfy bed, but the reality is that if we stick to our guns and 7.62×39 ammo, this will be us in just a few months! We have a lot to do and sometimes I don’t want to do it, parts of the planning aren’t fun, but it’s time to really get going. This is a long post so thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far, I suppose I’ll post more updates as we go along. 🙂

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