Living a Bucket List Kinda Life
“Is this heaven?” asks Ray Liotta portraying, Shoeless Joe Jackson. The local farmer, Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner replies, “no, it’s Iowa” in one of the classic scenes from the iconic movie, Field of Dreams.
One of the hidden benefits of full time travel is finding yourself in places you dreamt of visiting, completely on accident! As we planned our travels east from our summer hideout in the Black Hills to a work event in Virginia, we had a plethora of routes we could choose.
Should we go north into North Dakota to see Theodore Roosevelt National Park? (a hidden gem in the NPS) Do we take the most expeditious route east across Nebraska? So many options! Sometimes, one of the hardest parts of having so much freedom, is just that, too much freedom!
What we decided to do is examine the routes and identify which one would have friends we could visit along the way? Being full time on the road can get lonely, it can be isolating, being intentional about building, maintaining, and valuing your community is important to help combat that.
With that it was decided. We would head east through South Dakota, Minnesota, and then drop south into Iowa to visit Cole, Danielle, and their family. We would make their new home in Iowa a destination point on our route. Time to catch up, laugh with old friends, and see what their new life looked like.
What neither Andrea or I knew was that a place I had always wanted to visit, was less than an hour away from our friends and could easily be put on our route. The best of all worlds intersecting at the same time? Visiting friends, traveling to new places, crossing off a bucket list item?
It’s moments like this that make the struggles, doubts, and uncertainty of full time travel completely worth it!
To be full prepared for the moment Andrea and I rewatched the movie. She thoroughly enjoyed hearing me recite the lines I had seen so many times throughout my life. I would finally after all these years be able to have a catch in the outfield grass I had dreamt about since I was a teenager.
Some of life’s best surprises and moments will occur when you expect them least.
Just keep dreaming and looking for them!