Category ArchiveEverywhere Once |

End of the Road

by Brian on October 3, 2012 in How To, Lifestyle, Travel

Our RV road trip is nearing an end. Some months ago we realized that this chapter of our lives was coming to a close. Now, the next chapter is starting to come into focus.

Over the next 18 months we expect to mostly complete our tour of the United States. We’ll spend this winter making our way up the Pacific Coast and be in position to hit Alaska next summer. Over the fall we’ll work our way back down through eastern Washington, Oregon and California. By the time we reach Yosemite National Park, we’ll mostly be done RVing.

From there we might go on a short tour to promote Shannon’s upcoming book, Writers between the Covers (depending on release date) or drive back east to hit some of the places in the middle of the country we missed. Either way, sometime in 2014 we expect to be finished with our North American road trip.

How to Get Lucky

by Brian on September 17, 2012 in How To, Lifestyle, Travel

On good days I accept it as a compliment; a sincere expression of admiration. Other times, though, it’s hard not to take the meaning literally.

“You’re so lucky.”

Lucky. The word hangs in the air like an accusation.

In many ways we are lucky. We’re lucky to have been born to middle class families in the richest country on earth. We’re lucky to have been raised by loving parents; to have received a good education; to have our health and all of our faculties. I’m immensely grateful, every day, for my good fortune.

In short, we’re lucky in the same way that millions of other middle class residents of developed countries are lucky. Everything else took effort, determination, sacrifice and, perhaps most importantly, a strong belief that we are the masters of our fate.

Which brings me to the other thing I hear when someone says “You’re so lucky:” capitulation. Capitulation to the vagaries of life. Surrender to imagined forces beyond our control. I hear in these words the sentiment “if only I were luckier, things would be different.” That’s a copout. We assign ourselves too easy a task in life when we ascribe so much of our condition to luck.

The Indispensible Man

by Brian on September 3, 2012 in How To, Lifestyle, Travel

These empty chairs were meant for you.

“I feel like I’d be less of a person, a bad employee, if I didn’t work on vacation,” says Jermaine Turner, director of current series for Walt Disney Pictures Animation in a recent BusinessWeek.com article.

Mr. Turner is not alone. A Harris Interactive study “found that 57 percent of working Americans will have unused vacation time at the end of [2011], and most of them will leave an average of 11 days on the table – or nearly 70 percent of their allotted time off.”

That is a remarkable finding: the majority of us take less than one third of our vacation time. And on those rare occasions when we do break away, we bring work along with us. Why?

Break the Rules. Go Home with Strangers

by Brian on July 20, 2012 in Colorado, Lifestyle, Travel

Nelly’s handmade saddle

As often happens in life, good things start with a beer. That is, after all, how Shannon and I found ourselves on the back of Nelly, the very first horse either of us had ever ridden.

In retrospect, we didn’t really stand a chance. The Main Street Brewery in Cortez, Colorado, was walking distance from our campground. We find so few things in this country we can walk to that we always take notice of those we can. Boozy establishments that we don’t have to drive home from are especially rare and prized finds. So there never was a question of whether we’d pull up a bar stool at the brewery a few blocks from our door. It was really just a question of when.

Our timing couldn’t have been better.

What the ObamaCare Decision Means for Perpetual Travelers Like Us

by Brian on June 29, 2012 in Money & Finance

Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

EverywhereOnce isn’t a political blog, and this isn’t a political post. Health insurance, for us, isn’t a political matter but a practical one.

Of all the things we had to consider when preparing to hit the road full-time, how to manage health care costs was not only the most significant but also the most unpredictable.

In 2010, when we left behind our Mega Corp provided health insurance coverage and surrendered ourselves to the tender mercies of the individual insurance market, we couldn’t guarantee we’d even be sold an individual policy. Now that we have one, we can’t be sure it will actually be honored if ever we get expensively sick—despite paying hefty premiums each and every month.

We’ve written before about the special challenges we faced in trying to obtain health insurance without a physical address. We worried, and still worry, about our insurance company’s ability to declare our application fraudulent because we don’t actually live in our state of declared residency – or any state for that matter. Being citizens of the U.S. should be sufficient to buy a U.S. health insurance policy, but alas, it is not.