Introduction: You're doing what?!?

If you are reading this blog, the assumption is that you are, at least for now, an interested friend or an otherwise obligated family member trying to keep up with us. Sorry if I get verbose, but while this blog is meant to be a way to stay in touch with the folks back home, it is also intended to be a trip log and a chapter in our family history. So, if you get bored with my rambling, you may want to dial down to simply following our occasional Facebook posts.

While this may be rehash for some, it might be helpful to you newcomers to recap the decisions and events that have taken us to South America for the next few months. I guess this whole story might find its origins in us having been spoiled by a dream job in Grand Canyon that allowed us so much flexibility and freedom in the off-season for so many years. Simply put, no other job seems to compare to floating on a boat for money. Backing away from that career and diving into public sector real estate development for the past eight years has been really rewarding, and might be so again someday, but I think we both knew deep down that nine-to-five work wasn't something that will make us happy in the long term. With my work keeping me away from home so much, we found that the only times I was around were those stressful hours in the morning rush and the often more stressful hours getting the girls to bed at night. The father that I was to our girls was not the guy I wanted them to remember, and my SLC property management position, although challenging and stimulating, was proving to be a dead-end career path. We have a number entrepreneurial ideas and prospects we have wanted to pursue but, with us so deep entrenched in the daily grind, there never seemed to be any time to put them through any sort of informed analysis or scrutiny. We decided that we needed to change our trajectory before I missed some of the most meaningful experiences of our girls' childhood and ended up a career bureaucrat. So we came up with a plan that we named “The Hard Reset”. God and budget willing, this plan puts us on a family adventure for the next year or so, taking us from Salt Lake to Escalante, to Peru, and who knows where else, while we work through how to begin the next chapter, career-wise.

Unconventional? Selfish? Reckless? Guilty as charged, I suppose. But, one day, our girls will be grown and may not want as much to do with us. Now is our time to start putting more energy into our family, because every minute we have is lived on borrowed breath. I hope this doesn't sound fatalistic but, having lost two of our best friends over the past three years, this point has been driven home in technicolor. Both Jim and Jonathan left wonderful partners and beautiful daughters in very sudden and tragic ways. If this is somehow to also be my fate (or hers, gulp), hopefully we will have locked up a mountain of cherished memories and experiences together. Meanwhile, we will keep taking our vitamins and wearing our life jackets!