About 2 years ago Rick’s company, omniture, was acquired by Adobe. With this acquisition came a couple of perks that made Adobe top my list of favorite employs. Along with photoshop, lightroom and other Adobe products that we could finally afford was the one I was the most excited about. A four week sabbatical after 5 years of employment. Rick had a little over 3 years under his belt with no plans of leaving. So I started dreaming about extended vacations we could take. Of course the tropics and Europe quickly came to mind but they weren’t very realistic. Our kids were too young to really appreciate it and our bank account was too small to cover it. I absolutely love to travel, I don’t think there is anywhere that I don’t want to go. Money is definitely a roadblock, but so is time. This sabbatical would give us a bit of time so I decided to try and squeeze in as many destinations on my list into one trip as possible. So we started planning. Last September the decision was made, Rick earned his sabbatical and our itinerary began taking shape. We decided to circle the United states hitting as many states as possible. I loaded up google maps and started mapping it out. It didn’t take long to figure out I needed 4 years not weeks to really explore the entire United States but we whittled it down to 6 weeks, 32 states, 8000 miles, 11 temples, 10 church history sites, 9 national parks and 30 ft of motorhome. We went back and forth as to what kind of vehicle would be taking us on this journey. We decided on a motorhome, Norm in Nephi had one he was getting rid of, we decided it would work for us so we brought the beast home. It barely fit in our driveway. Actually it didn’t really fit at all, but we lived with it in our driveway for the next 4 months. As soon as the snow started melting I started filling it with everything I could think of. Packing for a family of 7 for a 6 week trip is pretty involved I found out. It’s a good thing I started in April because it took me that long. I thought the day would never come, we had been talking about it for so long and dreaming about it even longer. I was excited and very nervous. I ask Rick several times if we were absolutely crazy for doing this. “Yes” he said. And we are. But the thing is we knew that we would never be more than a couple hours from airport. If it didn’t work out we could always just fly home. So my plan is to write about each day of our trip and post it on my blog. The truth is, knowing myself as I do, I doubt it will really happen, but miracles do happen so we will see – just don’t hold your breath.
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