At forty-seven years of age, after thirteen years of parenting and sixteen years of marriage, things were going just fine in our lives…so…naturally, we decided to upend it all. Wendy and I took the box that held the pieces of our lives, and, in a moment of searing realization that it was like a freight train gathering steam, we dumped it on the ground and reorganized the pieces into something new. We sold the house (and most of our stuff), quit our jobs, pulled the girls out of school, bought an RV, and left our life behind for a year on the road with the family.

“It’ll be a grand adventure,” we told our three daughters—aged eight, eleven and thirteen. “We’ll develop an unbreakable bond! We’ll disconnect from technology and be engaged in the present! We’ll see the country! The world will be our oyster and we’ll slurp the virulent juices from the shell like savages!” That last part drew a few raised eyebrows at my overeagerness.

“It doesn’t matter that we don’t know anything about RVing,” Wendy assured me.

“It doesn’t? What about health care and prescriptions and that kind of stuff?” I said, in my typical overthinking-it style.

“Who cares? We’ll figure it out,” she said, in her typical ask-for-forgiveness-later style.

“Money?”

“Sure, we’ll have enough to spare if we can sell the house.”

“Weather? Vicious animals? Flat tires? Unsavory characters?” What could possibly go wrong?

And so begins the wild ride that simply became known as "The Trip"