How we got here….

Not to this literal location but to this point in our lives. 

Practically:

When I was in nursing school they gave examples of allllll the different types of nursing jobs there were and I remember being in awe of two of them. A travel nurse and a cruise ship nurse. Like it is part of your job to go see the world! I was supposed to get married 2 months after getting done with nursing school and there really wasn’t an option to do the travel nurse life. In my irrational fearful brain I told myself if Chase died before we got married I would be travel nurse. Thankful Chase didn’t die… But there’s still alway been a desire to be a travel nurse. 

In the fall of 2019 Chase and I chatted and really felt like God was leading us to travel nursing. We had a year before Mac would be starting school and 2020 could be our travel year. Well that spring the world changed (as you may remember) and all the post-partum (mom baby, the type of nursing job I LOVE) travel nurse jobs were gone. But we still left like God was pushing us towards travel. We were talking to friends and one mentioned that when they retired they would want to do “work camping”. What’s that you say….you go work at a camp ground, get to stay there for free and get paid to do so…. and that’s when the seed was planted and the rest is history! 

We still might try to do a travel nurse stent while we are out and about. When the time comes for us to head to a new spot, we look through nursing jobs and camp ground jobs and pray over it all, trusting God will show us the way. 

Financially: 

On Valentine’s Day of 2016 we had a very romantic evening sorting through our bank statements and credit card statements for the previous three years and seeing where we spent money. We had a wakeup call and changed some things. One of us stopped spending 100s of dollars a month on eating out. And one of us stopped spending 100s of dollars a month on things that we “needed” or got ” just incase” but justified it because it was a great deal in the clearance section or at the thrift store. We began being intentional with each dollar we spent and ended up saving a lot of them. 

Fast forward a bit in 2018 we bought two rental properties, a town home and a house. In 2019 we bought a duplex and went in on flip with a partner. And in January of 2020 we bought another rental house. To date we have four roofs and five tenants. Our business partner for the flip has turned into our property manager while we’ve been on the road and it’s going well!

We can’t live off of our rental properties income, but it does allow us a safety net as we do this travel thing. With our camp ground jobs we are not saving for college but we are not going into debt. We are making the money that we need today, making enough for our food and gas and insurance. The rentals give us the peace of mind that if something “came up” it would be okay.

Relationally: 

We 100% miss our humans. Our family and friends. It’s like when you’re on vacation and you want your people to be there with you to see the things and share the experiences….but you don’t want to leave the vacation….that’s what we’re living in. The time we are getting with our boys is a treasure and only here for a season so we are soaking it up.

I never thought we’d get community out on the road. But we’ve connected with a couple of families and it’s been really sweet. We sang worship songs and watched a bible study and had fellowship…in a camper and it was beautiful. We have two families that we met in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that have traveled here to do camper life with us for a bit. And we’ve met a couple more families here and it’s just amazing how God orchestrates it all. It has been beautiful to see and a loud reminder of how He provides. We can look back and see how He has brought this whole journey together and know He has the future covered as well!