Plans Fail: change the plan not the goal

I’ve been meaning to write our first post for a while, but planning and preparing for our tiny house adventure has been the top priority. Finally today we packed up the tiny house. Our home for the next months. We are almost ready to leave Hampton Roads, Virginia, and head to the mountains on our big sabbatical road trip! Whoop whoop!

Here are some stats about our tiny house adventure…

• 7307 miles (at least!)
• 198 hours of driving
• 75 points of interest marked on our route
• 120 days that’s 17 weeks and 1 day!
• 14 National Parks

This list is totally dependent on just one thing! The US borders have to open up to tourists before the 14th August OR USCIS let’s us stay after we make an appeal to them (but we can’t do that until August). Otherwise we will have to cut our trip short and we will only go for 38 days.

The truth is, we have always been flexible about this trip. And with COVID-19 we knew we would have to be extra flexible and go where COVID-19 wasn’t, as well as isolate when needed to. But the borders remaining closed is highly problematic for us. You see we are Brits living in the USA! We have been legal non-immigrant aliens for the past 7.5 years. So, our plan was to fly from Spokane to Vancouver for a short city trip and return on tourist visas. But the US aren’t allowing tourists in (understandably). And we can’t simply just stay in the US.

I didn’t want to start this blog with a seemingly negative post. Whatever happens we WILL have a sabbatical (even if that isn’t in the USA) and COVID-19 won’t get us down!!!

Today we packed up the tiny house. It was HOT!! 93F feels like 110F! For those of who know, air conditioning doesn’t work on battery, so we unpacked the house without it. As you can imagine, we were hot sweaty messes! We still have a bit more to pack and organize before Chris takes the Tiny House and departs on Monday. We were pleasantly surprised all this fit….

We are packed as if we are going to do the full 120 days, including two excursions to Canada and Hawaii AND tent camping in Yellowstone National Park for 5 days! Whoever buys our tiny house at the end of our trip will have a fully kitted out trailer. Everything from kitchen ware, to blankets, to boxes, to cleaning stuff 😝

Enough for our first post…it’s going to get exciting soon.

By the way, we think this is a good omen that Chris found this wine today (Yosemite is one of our last stops).