Pete and I met in 2015 in Texas, where I was living at the time. I worked for a major airline, and he was working for a major telecommunications company. He lived in Kansas at the time, but was in Texas for a training assignment. We both swiped right and 3 years later we were married! We shared interests centered around the environment and sustainability. I had my worm compost and small garden in the backyard, and he had built a solar concentrator for his house in Kansas. Soon after we met, he left corporate America and started his own handyman business.

Once March rolled around, I was working from home full time, but Pete's handyman business was drying up. The first big change came at the end of March, when we decided to take in our son's dog, Loki. I have never had a pet, let alone a dog, and never really wanted one; working in the airline industry afforded me the luxury of traveling often, and so to have a pet would have meant more things to worry about when the sudden weekend trip option presented itself. But our son couldn't keep both of his dogs, Pete had always wanted another dog, and I knew it was the right time to bring the right dog into my life. He has been a terrific companion, and I can't imagine life without him now. Even my parents bonded with him, and that's saying a lot!

April brought with it a job at a big online retailer for Pete, and whispers of early-out packages for me. At first, I didn't think much of leaving my company. After all, I'd worked in the airline industry for almost 26 years, with two companies and across three cities! But truth be told, I had been thinking that it was time for a change. I really wanted to do work that was more meaningful to me personally. Don't get me wrong, I loved my job, and especially the wonderful people that surrounded me, but I had been missing a sense of personal purpose.

So we talked about how neat it would be to buy land somewhere, build our own house, live off the land, be self-sufficient when it came to electricity and water. We looked online at land prices in Texas, and went back to work each day, and looked some more, and crunched some numbers, and went back to work. At some point, we decided that we just weren't ready to make the change (and to this day, I can't remember the reasoning behind it!).

May and June swept in with no relief in sight from the pandemic, and we realized that we were going to be dealing with this for quite some time. Two things happened in June that made us rethink our earlier decision to wait before diving into buying land and building our house. First, my company offered additional early-out packages, and second, the real estate market was hot! It became clear that 'now' was the right time after all; we were still young enough that the prospect of the work needed for this adventure was doable. I submitted my paperwork to retire from my company and we began to plan our Grand New Adventure!

I never thought I was much of a planner, and I always considered myself a 'go with the flow' type of gal. In my years at the airlines, traveling stand-by (waiting to get on a plane only if empty seats were available) meant being veeeeeery flexible in my travel plans, and even flying to a different country if needed (I did that once; no seats from London to Dublin an any of the flights, so I changed my plans and went to visit my cousin in Prague instead!)

I'm sure as I got older, I started planning my life a bit more; some of that came from project management work at my job too. And so it was no surprise when we made the decision to move forward I started planning it out. At a high level, I came up with 4 phases of the Grand New Adventure. Little did I know I had them a bit out of order!

1. Sell the Texas house - completed in Sep 2020

2. Sell the Kansas house - sold in May 2021

3. Buy the land - completed in Dec 2020

4. Build the house - in progress

I won't go into details on the first two phases, they're the boring ones! But I will say that there was a 'sub-phase' in this plan of mine that I was unaware of until Pete brought it up. Where would we live while we were building our house? An RV, of course, he tells me! This solution had never crossed my mind. I, in fact, had never been in an RV, and now I was supposed to live in one? But remember how I started this section - by saying I was flexible! We had enough savings to look for a used RV and found a 2001 Holiday Rambler Endeavor motorhome. We sold some of our belongings throughout the summer, and at the end of July, we packed up the motorhome and trailer with what we had left and headed to Kansas to officially start our Grand New Adventure!