Nobody Said It Was Easy

Chapter One

It began with a distant dream and a simple thought voiced out loud.

What if.

What if you follow your dream and hike The Pacific Crest Trail today, not someday.

What if we sell the house and move into a travel trailer so we can follow you while you hike.

What if we go on this epic adventure together.

The idea snowballed from there and before we knew it our house was on the market and the wild ride had officially began.

Our realtor recommended that we not be present for the showings and since Nick worked during the day while I stayed home with Atlas and Fenix, it was entirely up to me to schedule all walk through appointments with the potential buyers realtors.

With two young kids that meant scheduling around meal times and nap times, while still allowing time for people to actually walk through the house. It also meant I was in charge of operation evacuation where I had to plan out my exit strategy and hightail it out of there before anyone showed up.

And what an operation it was!

On the first day the house was listed for sale we had five showings. Five.

Once you have kids leaving the house is never a simple or straightforward procedure. It’s a long, drawn out, complicated mess that almost always results in forgotten items, a subsequent mad dash back into the house to retrieve said forgotten item and someone crying.

Step one, always, always load Crixus up first, otherwise he transforms from a beautiful, regal German Shepherd into a quivering, hysterical, neurotic mess. He becomes a walking, whining, 95 pound death trap who will trip us every opportunity he gets to ensure there is no possible way we could forget him. He is over the top clingy and we call him our velcro dog for very good reason.

Step two is the suff. With kids and especially babies you always have to plan for those what if situations. It’s a little like Murphy’s Law, if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. That one time you leave the house without an extra diaper or a change of clothes almost always guarantees you a diaper poo-splosion from hell. It’s like they somehow know there’s a weak spot in your defense and they’ll throw anything at it just to see what happens. Especially babies who really seem to know what they’re doing because nothing exposes those weaknesses quite like baby poop bubbling up to their neck while you’re driving down the road.

And God forbid you forget the goldfish crackers because suddenly the kids will decide they’re starving and if they don’t have some way to make a gigantic crummy mess they’ll surely die. So just in case, you grab ALL the things, even if you’re just driving around for twenty minutes.

Step three is the great child load up project. Whoever invented child car seats may love children and want to keep them safe, but man do they hate parents! The five point harness system is the bane of my existence but it has nothing on the actual car seat installation process which is a whole new level of torture.

Because Fenix wants to be held always, he gets loaded and buckled first so I can be hands free to buckle Atlas in next. That’s when I know I’m in the home stretch!

Step four is buckling myself in and just about the time the seatbelt goes click is when that tiny voice from the backseat says “I need to go the bathroom”. Lord have mercy.

Step five is driving around, waiting for the realtor to call and tell me I can go home again.

Lather, rinse, repeat. FIVE TIMES. It’s enough to drive a person completely insane.

For one of the showings the potential buyer came earlier than scheduled because she couldn’t wait (her words, not mine) which left me feeling like an intruder, scrambling to get out out of my own home. Before I could manage my escape, (see steps one through five above) I saw her opening closet doors like she owned the place and nothing really prepares you for that invasion of privacy.

Most of the people were in and out pretty quickly but there was one that lingered for over an HOUR. That was one hour of driving around with two kids and a dog who had long since tired of being in the car. Spoiler alert, she ended up being the one to buy our house and rightly so.

I’ve just sucked one year of your life away, tell me, how do you feel? Exhausted! By the fifth time repeating step one through five, I felt like I’d been through The Machine from The Princess Bride a few time too many so it came as a huge relief when we had not one, but TWO offers by the end of that first day.

With day number two already in the books I had no choice but to ride out the house showing chaos where I got to repeat steps one through five an additional three times the following day.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel though because if we accepted one of the two offers by the end of the second day it would put an end to the house showing madness.

Both offers were at full asking price and after much deliberation we decided to go for it and accepted an all cash offer just two days after listing the house for sale. It was official. We had sold our home, there was no turning back now.

We were out of the frying pan and into the fire and as it turns out, we had merely traded one form of madness for another.

To give you an idea of the new chaos that followed, we listed the house on January 20th, accepted an offer and signed the selling paperwork on January 22nd and then scheduled our closing date for March 2nd with plans to hit the road a day earlier.

We had forty days to downsize a whole life. And let me tell you, those forty days were nothing short of chaotic as we scrambled to pack our entire lives into cardboard boxes and sell off or give away anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Then we had two cars to sell and we had yet to find, let alone buy, a travel trailer and a vehicle big enough to tow it.

We had a mandatory home inspection that exposed an alleged rodent problem under the house which resulted in a pretty ridiculous rat battle (more on that later).

And if that wasn’t enough, there was also a nervous carpet eating dog incident and subsequent impromptu floor repair. Fun times.

But you know what they say, when it rains, it pours! It was all or nothing, feast or famine with no happy medium in sight and if that isn’t chaos I don’t know what is!

I like to move it, move it and move it again, while dodging a neurotic 95 pound velcro dog who thinks he knows where you're going but isn't really sure, so he turns back to make sure and then I trip over him, babies and boxes flying. After I stop biting my tongue to minimize the colorful language my children are exposed to, Crixus actually had the audacity to look up at me with those wounded liquid chocolate eyes and worried dog eyebrows which seem to be crying: How could you do such a thing?

Honestly, you get pretty talented at doing things one handed when you become a parent, but packing and lifting heavy objects while a twenty five pound 1 year old clings to you for dear life and your 4 year old rivals the neurotic velcro dog, it really puts that skill and your patience to the test. 

This is the Shrieking Fenix, if you don't believe me, just wait. He always grows louder when you’re about to put him down. Fenix must have been a monkey in another life because he wanted to be carried everywhere, always, every second of every day and moving day was no exception. But couches don't move themselves so I put the monkey down and immediately wished I had ear plugs.

We took a break from all the moving, packing and purging long enough to drive two hours away to pick up a new Honda Pilot for a killer deal. It had a 5,000 pound tow rating and third row seating. Plus, bonus points for coming in a pretty sweet color.

The travel trailer wasn’t quite as easy and it took two RV shows, a couple travel trailer walk throughs and an insane amount of research before we finally found The One.

The One trailer to rule them all and by some small miracle, it was the only one of its kind in a three state radius and it just so happened to be only 13 miles from us. Meant to be? I think yes!

Tow vehicle? Check. Travel trailer? Check. Everything was coming along nicely.

The Travel trailer we settled on was a 20 foot Forest River Geo Pro. It had “bunker beds” as Atlas called them and was about as small and lightweight a trailer that we could find that also checked all the required boxes.

Atlas and Fenix delighted in ping-ponging between the bunker beds, the dinette and the master bed while we wondered how long our sanity would hold out.

Can you imagine a family of four, plus Crixus going from a 1,400 sq ft house to a 150 sq ft travel trailer? People do crazier things every day and we were up to the challenge of tiny living with two small kids and a giant dog.

On closing day we went to the title company and signed the paperwork that effectively ended our homeownership. It was a strange feeling walking away with so much money, knowing in a few short days we would be officially homeless.

We did a final walk through of the house on February 29th and nothing prepared us for the emotions that day. Walking into each empty room hurt more than we could have ever imagined possible but it was going into the boy’s bedrooms that nearly broke us.

Those rooms held such memories, so much hope and all the promise of memories we’d now never make within those walls.

This was not just any house, it was our home.

It was where I became a mother, where Nick became a father.

It was where we brought our first baby home for the very first time.

It was where we became a family.

It was where our family grew again, where Atlas became a big brother.

How many hours had I spent rocking them to sleep in those bedrooms?

How many sleepless nights did I blindly stumble from the warmth of my bed down that hallway to those bedrooms to comfort them in the night?

How many giggles had echoed off those walls?

Our babies took their first steps on that floor, ate their first food in that kitchen.

Atlas potty trained in that bathroom.

We thought we might break as all those memories swirled around us as we walked from room to room and our hearts ached.

Were we doing the right thing?

Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be so hard and closing the front door for the final time echoed so loudly and felt so final.

That last walk down the driveway felt like miles as the end of this final chapter in our first home weighed our steps down with sadness.

How could a house break our hearts so completely?

Tomorrow was the big day, the day we’d load up and drive away from the safety of the known with the chaos of the unknown looming so large before us. Could we do this?

The house was empty so we spent our final night as homeowners in the trailer which was parked across the street. After settling into what would be our home for the next six months, we felt a little like kids camping in the backyard for the first time. It was a bizarre feeling, exciting and sad all at the same time.

But we did it. We made it happen. Our dream was finally realized, this was real and it was happening today, not someday and our lives would never be the same again.

When March first rolled around, with tears in our eyes and hope in our hearts we hooked up our new home on wheels and prepared to start our journey.

We loaded our four year old Atlas, one year old Fenix and our German Shepherd named Crixus into the Pilot and slowly pulled away from the house that was no longer ours.

It was official, our Grand Adventure was finally underway and we were Southern California bound.