Our Biggest Adventure Yet: We're Selling Everything and Hitting the Road

AHHH! Isn't this completely crazy?! Whether you came over from our newsletter or our big announcement video, you already know the news. We are officially selling our house, parting with almost everything we own, and taking our kids out on the road for six months, maybe even longer, starting in early 2027! We still get butterflies just typing that out. But before you think we woke up on a random Tuesday and lost our minds, pull up a chair and let us tell you the real story. Because this dream didn't happen overnight. It started almost eighteen years ago with two kids sitting on a roof with big dreams and zero idea how we were ever going to get there.

This dream started on a roof

Jake and I grew up as backyard neighbors in a small town in central Illinois. Neither of us grew up traveling much at all, but we would sneak up onto the roof of my mom's house and talk for hours about getting out of our little town and actually seeing the world someday. Then life happened! 😂

We got married young. And I mean really young. I was 21 years old, fresh out of college, and had just been hired on at my very first adult job. Jake was making about $400 a week working full time as a motorcycle technician. Looking back, we have no idea how we even bought a house that young, but somehow we did, and we were SO excited and proud! We were married, we had our little home about twenty minutes from where we grew up, and we were starting our careers. But we also looked at each other and knew in our gut that living paycheck to paycheck forever just was not going to work for us. Something had to change.

The years we worked for more freedom

So we got to work! First came Jake's big move. He went all in on a five year apprenticeship to become an electrician. Five more years of school and training on top of working full time? That was a HUGE commitment, but it gave our family a trade and steadier income down the road. I kept working too, and we stacked whatever else we could on top of all of it. Which is where the character business comes in.

While we were both still working full time, we started dressing up as characters for birthday parties and events on the weekends. I was Elsa more weekends than I can count, and Jake was Captain America, Spider Man, Olaf and pretty much whoever else we needed him to be. 😂 We did that for about seven years, starting before we even had kids. Once Aniston came along, she spent about two years tagging along to parties with us before we finally retired the costumes and sold the business right before COVID hit. Talk about timing!

As crazy as those years were, we are SO grateful for them. All that extra work got us out of debt and gave us more choices. And once Aniston and Noah were here, those choices meant even more. We didn't want to wait until retirement to have time together. We wanted to do it while our kids were still little.

Maybe we're doing this backwards. We got married and put our heads down while other people our age were traveling and figuring out what they wanted. Some might call what we're doing now a midlife crisis. I like to call it a midlife awakening. 😂

Our careers couldn't come with us

Did we have doubts along the way? Oh, about a million of them! Every single year we wondered if a life like this was even possible for a family like ours.

Jake is a union electrician, and if you know how union trades work, it's set up a little differently. If he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid. Period! There's no PTO quietly piling up in the background. Technically he can take off whenever he wants, which sounds amazing until you realize the catch: we'd better have enough saved to cover his time off AND our regular bills on top of whatever the trip costs. Talk about a reality check! And I spent 14 years as a dental hygienist, which is not exactly a job you can do from a beach. 😂

Then I fell HARD down the rabbit hole of points and miles. I taught myself how to put our everyday spending, like groceries, gas and bills, on one of our favorite travel cards to earn free flights and hotel stays. And that changed so much for us! Suddenly we could take the kids on trips that would have cost thousands out of pocket. But even free flights don't magically make your jobs remote. Both of our careers only worked if we physically showed up, so every trip still ended the same way: back home, back to work.

And here's the thing, there was one thing I'd been doing for years that I never thought of as anything more than a hobby. Creating content has just always been in my blood! On my personal pages, I loved creating skits, sharing unique adventures, couples challenges, and just everyday life, simply because I love storytelling.

Not everyone understood it, especially in a small town where most people follow the same path. For years, I had people tell me I was embarrassing, or that I needed to stop posting. I even had "friends" talk behind my back, and once, someone accidentally sent me one of my own reels with a text meant for someone else, saying I looked ridiculous and would never make it.

That stings. It makes you sit there and question yourself: What is wrong with you? Why can't you just get a normal job like everyone else and do what you are supposed to do?

But that was the moment I realized something life changing: I look at the world differently, and that is okay. I look at the world as a giant classroom for our kids. I look at making videos as art, and teaching Aniston and Noah how to film and edit as real life education. Sharing what works for our marriage, our homeschool, and our family is my passion.

And here's the funny thing. I DID have a normal job! But people would still ask, why can't you just stick with that and be like everyone else? Because deep down, I'm just not like everyone else, and I've finally made peace with that. Real talk? I don't really want to grow up, haha! OK, that's not totally true. I want to raise strong, brave, kind humans more than anything, and that part matters to me deeply. But the rest of it? Boring! We want to have FUN somewhere along the way! Somewhere along the line, I think we were all taught that once you become an adult and a parent, that's just it, you stay inside the box and don't pursue much outside of it. We are SO glad we took a chance on ourselves. Because even if we stopped all of this tomorrow, we'd still have our careers, and boy, would we have some amazing memories. We don't regret saying yes and taking a chance on our family for one single second.

Learning to be your own biggest cheerleader is not easy, but letting go of other people's opinions is the most freeing feeling in the world. And while walking this road meant discovering that some people weren't truly in our corner, it also brought us the most unbelievable, supportive community of open minded people we could have ever dreamed of. (And to our real life friends and family who have loved and cheered for us every single step of the way: you know who you are, and we love you endlessly.)

So Jake and I finally asked ourselves the big question. What if the thing I loved doing for free could become something that gave our family more time together, and maybe even traveled with us? We loved adventuring together, finding unique experiences, and encouraging other families to get out there too. About a year and a half ago, that idea became The Venture Seekers! We definitely didn't have some master plan. We just wanted to share what we genuinely loved, work with people and brands we trusted, and see where it could go. And this September, after 14 years in dental hygiene, I officially walked away from my career to do this full time. AHHH, still pinching myself!

And the part that still warms my heart the most? We brought Jake home more. No more overtime, which means so much more time with the kids. As a wife and a mom, I don't want to soak up all these little moments alone and send them to Jake in a text. I want him right here with us, and for that we will always be grateful.

What it really took to get here

What you see on social media is usually the fun highlight reel, but getting here took a LOT of sacrifice behind the scenes. Starting this page meant countless early mornings before anyone else was awake and late nights after the kids were tucked in bed. I will never forget working on our Iceland guide until midnight one night and realizing I wasn't even going back to bed, because a full homeschool day was starting in a few hours. Living like that is definitely not healthy long term!

But somewhere in all of that, I had a moment of total clarity. No one is coming to save us. No one is going to hand us these experiences. We don't have an inheritance, we don't get money from our families, neither of us grew up with families that traveled, and we didn't have jobs that let us work remotely so we could travel more. So we had two choices. We could sit back and feel bummed about it, OR we could BE the change. Do the research, put in the hours, and work our tails off to see if we could make this happen for our family.

And today, you are watching a ten year dream come to life for our little family in real time. The only way this dream keeps going is our family working hard and YOU supporting our page. If you've watched a video, shared a post, read a blog, used one of our links or booked something we recommended, you helped make this possible. Thank you, truly. We will never, ever take that for granted.

And just so you know, whenever we share a link or a code, it will only ever be for things we genuinely love, use and trust with our own family. Using them never costs you a single penny extra, but it helps support our upcoming travels and lets us keep creating free guides and resources for you. That means the world to us!

Why now

If this has been a ten year dream, you might be wondering, why now? Why not wait until the kids are older, or until retirement, or until life feels a little less chaotic? Trust me, we've asked ourselves that a hundred times!

The honest truth is, staying put always felt safer. Our whole family is right here in Illinois. Our parents, our siblings, the cousins our kids adore, the people we grew up with. We've built an amazing homeschool community here too, and the kids love their activities and their friends. Leaving all of that is easily one of the hardest parts of this whole decision, and we wrestle with it constantly. This is NOT an easy decision at all.

And for fourteen years, our sweet dog Jenny was a huge part of our family. Her last four or five years were really tough. She developed anxiety, dementia and some medical issues, and anyone who has loved an aging pet knows how hard it is to balance everyday life with keeping them safe and comfortable. We tried so hard to balance it all, and we had to say goodbye to her earlier this year. We miss her every single day.

So what finally shifted? For us, it started a few years ago with a huge wake up call.

One morning I woke up and couldn't walk. I was extremely ill and had no clue what was wrong with me. Eight doctor visits, two ER visits, a colonoscopy and an endoscopy later, I was told I had anxiety. I fell into the deepest depression I have ever felt, because it was like someone flipped a switch on my everything. My personality was gone. I didn't understand why walking was so hard, why I felt like passing out all the time, or why I had lost 14 pounds so fast. Would I die? I wasn't homeschooling the way I was used to, and the kids were stepping up and helping more than they even knew.

I knew I either needed to figure this out or we were in big trouble, so I went to a functional doctor. A confirmed blood test finally gave us the answer: Lyme disease. And BOY is that a nasty disease! It was SO good to hear that I wasn't losing my mind and this wasn't just anxiety. It was something real and serious. For the last few years I've had blood work about every two to three months and taken tons of supplements. I'm still not 100% better, but boy am I glad to be partly better!

I think that's exactly why I love doing ALL the things now, because my body is still letting me. And my husband and kids get it too. How grateful are we to have air in our lungs? Legs that get us where we need to go? Energy to go hike, or to sell our home and travel? These are things that are so easy to take for granted, so please don't. I promise I won't turn this page into a health blog, but that season opened my eyes and my family's. It's time to stop making excuses and worrying about what other people think. We aren't getting any younger, and we just have to try and see.

Yes, it's scary and exciting all at the same time, and there are so many unknowns. But even though these next months, and maybe years, of traveling feel like a lot, it's a really small sliver of our whole life. Our hope is to build community, grow, learn and see new places together, and finally answer the big question: where does our family truly feel at home?

Homeschooling gave us another kind of freedom

We've been homeschooling for five years now, so school on the road isn't new for us, it's just our normal life! But once you step away from a desk, you realize how much kids soak up when they're out in the world. Geography is following our route on a real map. History is standing right where it happened. Science, nature, culture and math show up everywhere.

And business? Our kids get a front row seat to entrepreneurship every single day! They've learned how to make videos, and a lot of the funniest ideas in our ads come straight out of their imaginations. 😂 When they choose to help, they get paid for their work. They're learning how to build something with their family while still getting to just be kids and have a blast. We don't want travel to replace their education. We want the places we visit to become part of it.

If you want to know more about our homeschool journey and what we actually use, I shared our whole homeschool story and what helped us here.

We honestly aren't sure if we'll homeschool forever. When we think about our forever home, we hope to find a community that supports homeschooling, but also has great schools in place if we ever choose that route. Either way, we want the focus to be hands on and outdoors. This year in Colorado, we chatted with a local whose kids go to a public school that takes field trips hiking and white water rafting! That is NOT normal where we're from, and it got us so excited. We want our kids learning real skills that will help them as they grow into adults.

So what are we actually doing?

We're selling our house, sorting through years and years of STUFF 😂 and figuring out what comes with us, what gets stored and what we're finally ready to let go of. Then we're hitting the road as a family for six months, maybe longer.

Our hope is to really tackle the western side of the United States. We don't want to just drive through it and check places off a list. We want to slow down, experience different areas, find the adventures, meet people and get a feel for what everyday life could actually look like there. We're keeping exact dates and stops to ourselves for now, because we share a lot of our lives online, but our family's safety matters more than giving the internet a detailed itinerary.

And no, we're not buying an RV. We're not living in a campervan either. We're doing this a little differently. For this chapter, we'd rather stay in places long enough to settle in, do school, keep working, and get a feel for everyday life than pack up every few days.

We have a plan for how we're going to make this work, and there has been A LOT happening behind the scenes to get us here. But we're also still very much IN IT. 😂 So we'll share more as we go, but we're not going to pretend we have all the answers before we've actually lived it.

Because the truth is, this announcement might look like the beginning of the story, but for us it's really the result of almost ten years of decisions. Getting out of debt. Working extra jobs. Building careers. Learning to live on less than we made. Homeschooling. Starting a business. Creating income that could move with us. Preparing to sell our house. Deciding what to keep, sell and store. And now figuring out all the logistics of taking a family of four on the road for months at a time.

There is SO much more behind how we're actually making this happen than we could ever fit into one blog post. We're documenting the whole process, the debt, the money, the years of preparation, the career changes, the logistics, what worked and what didn't, and eventually we want to put it all together in one detailed place.

Not because we think we have it all figured out. 😂 But because when we started dreaming about having more freedom with our time, we would have LOVED to see how another regular working family actually worked toward something like this over YEARS instead of only seeing the highlight reel once they got there. We want to live this next part before we pretend we can tell you exactly how to do it. If you want to follow along a little closer, join our monthly newsletter here. That's where we share the behind the scenes of this whole move as it happens, and you'll be the first to hear when we put all those details together.

We're looking for more than an adventure

As exciting as six months of adventuring sounds, we're not doing this just to travel. Somewhere along the way, we're also hoping to find home.

We've lived in Illinois our entire lives. There's so much here we're grateful for, but we've always wondered if there might be somewhere else that fits the way our family loves to live a little better. We want to be outside. Give us kayaking, hiking, biking, via ferratas and actual ways to ENJOY all four seasons. Because right now winter mostly feels like shoveling the driveway and wondering when the sun is coming back. We'd much rather be out snowshoeing. 😂

But we also know choosing a forever home is about a lot more than having mountains outside your window. We want community. We want great options for our kids to learn and make friends. We want somewhere Jake's trade could still give our family opportunities if that's something he chooses to continue. We want a cost of living that makes sense for the kind of life we're trying to build. Those things matter just as much to us as the adventures.

And we have absolutely no idea where that place is yet. Instead of picking somewhere from photos and hoping we love it, we're giving ourselves time to experience different places and see where our family actually feels at home. And that's probably the part we're most excited about.

This is where you come in

You have been cheering our family on, watching us grow, learn from our mistakes, and pursue this dream right alongside us. That is why we did not want to wait until everything was neatly packed into boxes or tied with a bow to let you in on the secret. We wanted you right here with us from day one, sharing the messy middle, the butterflies, and every little step along the way.

If you live out West, grew up there, travel there all the time or just feel like you know our family pretty well by now, where do we need to go? What experiences do we HAVE to try? What little towns or communities should be on our radar? What are the places that don't make every travel list but you know The Venture Seekers would absolutely love?

And maybe the biggest question of all... where out West could you actually see our family calling home?

We want you guys in on this from the beginning. We want to share the preparation, the decisions, the things that inevitably go wrong, the places we fall in love with, the adventures we didn't even know existed and hopefully, somewhere along the way, the place that starts to feel like home. Tell us in the comments below. 👇🏻

We'll share more of our plans as they come together. Right now, we're just excited to finally be able to tell you what we've been working toward behind the scenes.

And because The Venture Seekers has become part of how we're making this possible, we'll also be working throughout this entire chapter. We'll continue partnering with destinations, stays, experiences and brands that genuinely fit our family and what we share here. If that's you and you think there's somewhere we need to stay, something we need to experience or a way we could work together during this next chapter, we'd love to hear from you. Check out our Work With Us page or email us at collab@theventureseekers.net.

What freedom means to us

Freedom doesn't mean never working again. And it doesn't mean we're running away from a life we hate. We're incredibly grateful for what we've built here.

For us, freedom is time. Time with each other, time to say yes, and time to chase new adventures together while the kids are still young. Freedom of time is the richest thing we could ever ask for, and getting to spend it exploring new places as a family is a dream we don't take lightly.

Almost 18 years ago, two teenagers sat on a roof in Illinois talking about getting out and experiencing more. We had absolutely no idea what it would take to get here. And we still have no idea exactly how this story ends. But we're really excited that you get to be part of it.

Our biggest adventure yet is just getting started.

Seek Adventure Together. 🤘🏻

FAQ

When are you leaving?

We're planning for early 2027. We'll keep exact dates private and share updates as things happen.

Where are you going first?

We'll be heading toward California, among a few other spots, before our first big adventure. We'll share more on that soon, because of course the kids are putting together a presentation on it! 😂

Are you selling everything?

Almost, yes! Anything that won't serve a purpose for us in the future, like decor, furniture, some clothes and even toys, is being sold, donated or tossed. We are downsizing to a very simple lifestyle, choosing to keep what we need for this chapter of our life, not everything we want. All the money from what we sell is going toward gas, since that will probably be one of our biggest expenses, if not food. We really hope to cook more at our place than eat out, so we're bringing our Travoca eCooler to keep our fresh foods cold and have healthier options on the road.

Are you traveling in an RV?

No! While we loved our two weeks in a campervan in Iceland, for this chapter we're choosing short term Airbnb rentals with their monthly discounts, and hopefully partnering with stays that fit our family and that we'd genuinely love to share with you.

Will the kids keep homeschooling?

Absolutely! I don't think kids ever stop learning. Between everyday life skills and bringing home 30 books from the library at a time, our kids thrive on learning (a skill I definitely did not care to have when I was younger 😂). Our non negotiables of reading, writing and math aren't going anywhere, and we'll keep our same routine. We also school year round, which makes it easy to take small breaks when we need them.

How long will you be gone?

At least six months, but maybe longer! We're taking it season by season.

How can we follow along in real time?

We're sharing across social, mostly on Instagram, plus Facebook and TikTok. We also share more behind the scenes in our monthly newsletter.

How can we support what you're doing?

The best way to support us? Share it if you love it, save it, or comment on it. That's it! We are SO appreciative of you all.

-Brittany, The Venture Seekers