Continuing Our Adventure…What’s Next?

It was just a little over one year ago, that we left behind our “perfect” life for an “imperfect” future. I use quotation marks because our life looked perfect, and even felt perfect…with thriving careers and a beautiful home. But our priorities had changed. We evaluated what was important to us (spending time together, travel and the freedom to do both – how and when we wanted to) and we made huge changes to craft the new lifestyle we desired for ourselves.

We sold our house, sold or gave away most of our stuff, and implemented a one year plan to travel full time in an RV and support ourselves with our small business.

Our Goals:

• Travel throughout the country EXPLORING the USA, including the vast expanses of our national parks, rugged coastlines, towering mountains, green forests and arid deserts! We crave experiencing new places and creating new adventures together.
• Grow our online business, Destination Tree! Do what makes you happy, right? Well, we’re passionate about making cool and unique custom artwork. And we believed we could do what we love, the way that we wanted to, and make a great living at it.

We had a few doubters. We had a lot of supporters. And we have no regrets. We accomplished exactly what we set out to do.

Our Success:

• We visited 34 states. We hiked and explored over 40 National Park Sites. We have an even deeper appreciation for the beauty and majesty of our planet.
• We retrofitted a 10×10 space into a mobile workshop. We created and shipped hundreds of custom orders all around the world while traveling all across the country. We grew our business beyond our wildest expectation

Of course, there were challenges and sacrifices along the way. But they were all part of the journey. They were learning lessons and reminders that anything worth doing isn’t always going to be easy.

So now, more than a year later, a lot of people have asked:

“WHAT’S NEXT??”

Well, we’ve confirmed two things over the last year. We love to travel and we love being entrepreneurs. Traveling for an entire year fueled our desire to continue exploring both our country and the world. And the freedom, flexibility and joy we get out of entrepreneurship is priceless.

As we enter into this next chapter of our adventures, we have NO intention of settling down. However, we ARE going to restructure how we manage our two passions. Our business has grown so much over the past year that it is physically impossible to continue managing it in a 10×10 space while simultaneously traveling.

We’ve always loved Northern Michigan, so we’re leasing a warehouse in Petoskey in order to have the space to continue growing Destination Tree over the next several months and through the holiday season. We’ve also leased an inspiring little place to live for the same time period where we’ll develop our plans for our next phase which involves an exciting balance of entrepreneurship and continuing to travel the world.

Life really is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. And we’re going to keep living, enjoying the twists, turns and unexpected challenges along the way, but also making conscious choices to LIVE INTENTIONALLY…setting the course and steering the direction we want to go and exploring new places across the globe.

I’ve struggled with how to close out this blog post. Because our journey isn’t over. So, I’ve decided to leave you with my recent thoughts from our 365^th day on the road:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it is to believe in yourself. Believe in yourself and your abilities. Believe in yourself and your sense of adventure. Believe in yourself and the decisions you make. Believe in yourself and the mistakes, challenges and mishaps you learn from along the way. And believe in yourself enough to follow your dreams. It’s a big fat risk, but it’s worth it. And so are you.”

Cheers!

Kristin & Matt

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