Fear on Moments in the Miles

Who Told You It Was Too Late to Travel?

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been asked some version of this question more times than I can count.

Not always directly. Sometimes it comes dressed as concern. Shouldn’t you be saving more? Don’t you want to settle down? Isn’t it time to be practical? Sometimes it’s just a look: the slight pause when you mention you’re leaving again, the careful neutrality of someone who thinks you’re making a mistake but has decided not to say so out loud.

The question underneath all of it is the same: at some point, doesn’t this become irresponsible?

I used to feel the need to defend the choice. To explain the finances, justify the timeline, prove that we’d thought it through. To earn the right to live the way we were already living.

I don’t do that anymore. Because I’ve come to believe the question is aimed at the wrong person.

Grinnell Glacier, Montana

THE QUESTION NOBODY’S ASKING

Here’s what I want to ask back:

Is it irresponsible not to?

Not recklessly or without thought, but deliberately, with full awareness of what you’re choosing and what you’re trading: is it irresponsible to keep deferring the life you actually want?

Because there’s a cost to waiting that nobody puts on the spreadsheet. It doesn’t show up in your savings account or your retirement projections. It accumulates quietly, in the form of weeks that blur into months, in the slow narrowing of what feels possible, in the plans you keep moving to later until later stops being a real place.

We talk about financial irresponsibility constantly. We almost never talk about the other kind.

THE CAMPER THAT NEVER HAPPENED

I grew up with a single mother, two houses down from my grandparents in upstate New York. Two houses. Not across town, not a Sunday visit. Two houses. My grandmother was my second mother in every way that mattered.

I can still see her clearly. Short hair, glasses, usually with the Persian cats she raised or in the crafting room that took up half the house, always full, always mid-project, always hers. She was fierce in the way certain women are fierce, loving and opinionated and completely unapologetic about both. She spoke her mind, always. You knew exactly where you stood with her, and somehow that made you feel safer, not less.

My grandfather was her opposite in the quietest way. Scruffy, usually elbow-deep in a car or a motorcycle, not a man who needed many words. But he had a heart that made up for every one he didn’t say. I remember sitting on the kitchen table with him as a kid, the two of us eating ice cream straight out of the carton. No bowls, no occasion. Just him and me and the carton between us. That was enough for him. That was everything, actually.

Half the family had moved to Colorado by then. And for as long as I can remember, my grandparents had a plan. Work hard. Save carefully. Retire well. Then buy the camper: travel the country, move freely between the people they loved, finally have time to live. They wanted to see the places they’d only read about. They wanted to pull into a Colorado driveway without it being a whole production. They wanted the freedom to just go.

Before any of it. Somewhere on the water, upstate.

Retirement was when life would begin.

I was sixteen when my grandmother got sick.

At first they told her it was something minor, and she was treated for the wrong thing. Months passed. By the time anyone looked closer, by the time the real diagnosis came, it had already gone too far to stop.

I didn’t know how to handle any of it. I was sixteen. I went to school, I went to work, and I went to her. That was all I knew how to do. Just show up and be near her, because being near her had always been enough before, and I didn’t have anything else to offer.

She passed away before the camper ever happened. And after that, my grandfather was never quite the same. I watched decades of careful planning fail to guarantee more time. I watched the misdiagnosis steal the window. I watched the camper that never happened become the symbol of everything they’d saved for and never got to spend.

It was the hardest season of my life. And it reshaped me permanently.

There is no guarantee of later. That truth isn’t morbid. It’s clarifying.

It doesn’t mean spend everything and plan nothing. It means the version of responsibility that requires you to postpone living indefinitely isn’t actually responsible. It’s just familiar.

WE MADE THE VAN DECISION IN OUR 30S

This is worth saying plainly, because it cuts against the story people tell about who gets to do this.

We didn’t move into the van at 22, fresh out of college with no obligations and nothing to lose. We made that decision as adults, with full awareness of what it cost and what it gave back. Eight years of van life. All 48 continental states. A life built deliberately, not impulsively.

Then Southeast Asia. Eight months of slow travel through Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Not a gap year or a crisis, but a conscious extension of a life we’d been building for years.

None of it happened because we were young enough not to know better. It happened because we were old enough to know exactly what we were choosing, and to choose it anyway.

There is no right age for this. There is only the age you are and the decision in front of you.

RESPONSIBILITY AND FEAR ARE NOT THE SAME THING

This is the distinction that matters most, and it almost never gets made.

There is real financial responsibility: building a safety net, managing debt thoughtfully, making decisions you can actually sustain. We believe in all of that. We’ve written about it. We’ve lived it.

And then there is financial fear dressed up as responsibility: the anxiety that no number in a savings account will ever feel like enough, that any money spent on living your life is money you should have kept, that security is something you approach but never actually reach.

One of those is wisdom. The other is paralysis wearing responsible clothing.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to travel. For most people genuinely asking this question, the answer, when they actually run the numbers, is yes, with planning. The real question is whether you’ve given yourself permission to want it.

That permission doesn’t come from a financial milestone. It comes from a decision.

WHAT STAYING COSTS YOU

We talk endlessly about the cost of going. We almost never talk about the cost of staying.

Staying, out of hesitation or habit or the low hum of what everyone expects, has a price too. It’s just paid in a different currency.

It’s paid in the version of yourself that doesn’t develop because the circumstances that would have shaped it never came, in the conversations you never had with strangers in places that weren’t home, in the way your sense of what’s possible slowly contracts when it isn’t regularly expanded.

It’s paid in the accumulating awareness that there were things you wanted and kept choosing not to pursue, until one day the wanting fades and you mistake the silence for contentment.

We’re not saying travel fixes everything. It doesn’t. We’ve never claimed that.

But we are saying that the cost of going is visible and the cost of staying is invisible, and invisible costs are the ones that catch you by surprise.

THE IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE UNLIVED LIFE

My grandmother wasn’t irresponsible. She was careful and loving and fierce and devoted. She did everything right by the standards she’d been given.

She just believed, as so many of us are taught to believe, that living comes after. After the work is done, after the savings are full, after the obligations are met. After.

A misdiagnosis took the window. And the camper stayed parked.

What I carry from her isn’t resentment. It’s a lesson she gave me without meaning to, at a cost I would never have chosen for her. The lesson is this: the responsible thing and the safe thing are not always the same thing. Sometimes the most responsible choice you can make is to stop treating your life as a dress rehearsal.

Now I’m the one with the van, moving freely, crossing state lines, showing up to the people I love without it being a whole production. Seeing the country they wanted to see together.

I think about both of them when I drive. I have pieces of them with me the whole time: a blue plaid flannel that was my grandfather’s, a white sweater that was my grandmother’s. They ride along whether I planned on thinking about them that day or not.

You are not being irresponsible or reckless by choosing a life with movement in it. And you are not behind because you haven’t followed the script that was handed to you before you knew enough to question it.

What would be irresponsible is knowing what you want, having the means to pursue it, watching the window open, and choosing, year after year, to wait.

The camper never happened. The road is still here.

Go while you can.

Somewhere they would have loved.

The First Time We Almost Didn't Go

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We talked about it for a year

We almost stayed home. Not just once, but for an entire year.

We started talking about traveling through Asia twelve months before we ever booked a ticket. It lived in conversation, in late-night “what if” scenarios, in shared notes and half-researched destinations. We would bring it up casually over dinner, during long drives, in the moments when routine felt a little too predictable.

But we didn’t book.

We were holding back, probably for more reasons than we admitted out loud. Money, timing, work, stability. The comfort of knowing exactly what next month would look like.

Dreaming felt safe. Committing felt different.

Sedona, Arizona

I reopened the same flight search more times than I can count. Checked prices. Closed the tab. Opened it again days later. We weren’t saying no, but we weren’t saying yes either.

Then one evening, after staring at the screen longer than necessary, we finally did it. We hit book.

Everything changed in that instant. The tightness, the financial fear, the what-if-something-goes-wrong thoughts didn’t disappear, but they turned into a growing ball of excitement that felt like it was expanding inside my chest. Not reckless excitement or blind optimism. Momentum.

For the first time in a year, we weren’t just talking about it. We were going.

The fear wasn’t the money

Before we booked, the numbers felt overwhelming. I remember staring at our savings and wondering if we were being irresponsible. I used to believe travel was reserved for people with flexible incomes and padded savings accounts — people who didn’t feel a knot in their stomach before clicking purchase.

But when we finally laid everything out, our savings, upcoming expenses, the exact cost of flights and accommodations, the fear became clearer. The problem wasn’t affordability so much as uncertainty.

So we replaced uncertainty with strategy. We tracked our expenses for a month and found small leaks we hadn’t noticed: subscriptions, extra meals out, impulse purchases that felt harmless at the time. We created a dedicated travel fund and contributed to it consistently. Watching it grow shifted our mindset from “maybe someday” to “this is happening.”

We compared flexible flight dates. We looked at regional accommodation pricing. A one-day shift in departure saved hundreds. A different neighborhood lowered costs without sacrificing experience.

Once we had a plan, the fear felt smaller. Not gone, just smaller than our desire to go.

The bus

If I had to choose one moment that tested us on that trip, it wouldn’t be a beach or a temple or a perfect skyline. It would be a bus.

A 27-hour ride from Laos into Vietnam that felt less like transportation and more like endurance.

The first stretch ran deep into the night, narrow dirt roads carved into mountains. Endless hairpin turns. Massive potholes that launched us out of our seats. No guardrails, no streetlights. Just darkness and our headlights cutting a narrow path through the night for the first eight hours, the mountain swallowed in black and the road only visible where the light permitted it.

And no bathroom.

We had the two seats directly behind the driver, so we could see everything. Every blind curve, every steep drop, every stretch of road that looked more imagined than engineered.

The chairs were narrow and stiff, the kind that make your hips ache after an hour, let alone twenty-seven. We tried to sleep, but it was impossible. You could hear everything the drivers did: every gear shift, every press of the brakes, every acceleration before a climb. And underneath it all, the constant sound of the road. Gravel hitting metal, suspension straining, the dull thud of potholes.

There were five different drivers rotating throughout the journey. Five. And when all of them stepped forward at once to peer through the windshield at the upcoming stretch of road, you knew it wasn’t casual. It was serious.

At one point we hit a pothole so deep the entire bus gasped, me included. Luggage shifted. Someone muttered something under their breath.

We chose this.

Not in regret or panic. Just awareness.

The border at dawn

Sometime in the early morning hours, blurry and exhausted, we were told to grab everything: every backpack, every loose layer, every item shoved into overhead bins.

We stumbled off the bus alongside a full busload of equally exhausted travelers. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Sleep-heavy eyes. Very little conversation.

The border was open when we arrived. We stood in line for security and customs, clutching passports, trying to look alert enough to answer questions clearly. Then we collected our luggage and physically walked across into a brand-new country.

Sleepy, disoriented, arriving somewhere new in the grey light of early morning.

On the other side, the same bus waited. We climbed back in, stiff, dehydrated, running on very little sleep, and kept going.

A year earlier, we were afraid to click “Book.” Now we were crossing borders at dawn, exhausted and uncomfortable, trusting strangers to carry us through terrain we couldn’t fully see.

And strangely, I felt calm.

Because this is what saying yes actually looks like. It isn’t polished or comfortable or predictable. But it’s real.

Every yes since has looked something like this.

What it changed

Before	After
We waited for perfect timing.	We understand timing becomes clear once you commit.
Travel felt financially risky.	Not living fully feels riskier.
We needed certainty.	We need intention and courage.

That trip gave us more than stories. It changed how we approach decisions. We no longer wait for zero fear or expect complete clarity before acting. We plan strategically, and then we move.

Saying yes didn’t mean being reckless. It meant acknowledging fear, building a plan, adjusting priorities, and going anyway.

The first time we almost didn’t go, we chose yes. And that decision gave us more than a 27-hour mountain bus ride and a border crossing at dawn. It gave us proof.

Proof that fear shrinks when you face it, that preparation builds confidence, and that the uncomfortable parts are usually the ones that change you.

Now when hesitation shows up, we recognize it. It’s just the doorway.

Sometimes you can only see as far as your headlights allow. That’s enough to keep moving.

The world doesn’t open when everything is perfect. It opens when you go anyway.

The Miles Will Shape You (If You Let Them)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The night before we left, we had a bonfire.

My aunt’s backyard in Lone Tree. Family crowded around the fire, passing food, talking over each other the way our family does. Someone took a group photo where everyone smiles a little too wide because nobody knows quite what else to do. And at some point in the night I found myself sitting next to my little cousin.

He was nine. Quiet the way smart kids are quiet, taking everything in and missing nothing. We’d done a lot together, him and me. His first hike. His first camping trip. The first fish he ever caught, the first fire he ever built, the first s’more that collapsed in his hands before he could get it to his mouth. I was always trying to show him, without making a big thing of it, that the world was bigger than what he could see from where he was standing.

That night I didn’t know how to explain what we were about to do or why. So I didn’t try.

We just sat there by the fire.

We left before dawn.

I remember the neighborhood was completely still, that specific Colorado quiet where the air is thin and cool and the sky starts turning before the sun has any right to be up yet. The van was packed. Everything we needed, and nothing we didn’t, loaded into seventy square feet of space that was about to become our entire world.

I cried pulling out of that driveway.

I’m not sure I expected to. I was excited, genuinely excited. Florida was waiting. The road was waiting. The life we had been building toward was finally, actually happening. But I’ve learned something about myself since then, something that trip began to teach me: I cry when I leave things that fill me. Not from sadness exactly, but from fullness. From the ache of walking away from something that touched you and made you feel like the best version of yourself.

It’s the closest thing I know to what Anthony Bourdain meant when he said the journey changes you. That it should change you.

The leaving is part of it. It has to be.

We didn’t know how it was going to turn out.

I want to be honest about that, because I think we do a disservice to people who are still deciding when we tell our stories only in hindsight, when everything is already resolved, already meaningful, already worth it. Standing in that driveway in the dark, I had no idea what the next chapter looked like. I just knew that not going felt worse than the uncertainty of going.

That’s not courage. That’s just honesty.

There’s a myth that the people who make bold choices feel certain when they make them. That one day clarity arrives, the numbers line up, the doubts go quiet, and everyone nods in approval.

That has never once been our experience.

We were excited and scared and sad to say goodbye, all at the same time, standing in a driveway in Lone Tree, Colorado at four in the morning. We didn’t have a guarantee. We had a van, a direction, and each other.

It turned out to be enough.

Eight years. All 48 continental states. Tens of thousands of miles of road that looked like nothing on a map and everything in person. Desert light in Utah at golden hour, the kind that makes you pull over whether you planned to or not. The silence of a forest in the Pacific Northwest, deep enough to notice. Storm systems moving across the plains so big you can watch them from miles away, tracking them like something alive.

Antelope Canyon, Arizona

The view that stopped whatever we were talking about in the front seats.

The miles gave us all of that.

But more than the places, and this is the part that’s harder to explain, they gave us ourselves. A clearer, more honest version. Road life strips away the performance of ordinary life. There’s no keeping up with anyone in seventy square feet, and there’s no autopilot. You find out quickly what you actually need, what you can let go of, and what kind of person you are when comfort stops being guaranteed.

We didn’t always like what we found. But we needed to see it.

That’s what the miles do, if you let them.

I still think about that bonfire. He’s not so little anymore. Still quiet, still watching, still doesn’t miss much.

And he isn’t the only one I think about. There’s a whole crew of them now, all my little cousins plus Jesse’s niece and nephew, growing up while we’ve been out here. I try to show this to my whole family. But it lands differently with the young ones, because they’re still early enough in their lives that it can change the shape of things. What society tells you you’re supposed to do, the script you’re handed before you’re old enough to question it, is not the only option. There are other ways to build something.

I hope these years on the road have shown them some of that. Not that any of them has to live the way we do; they don’t, and that’s not the point. Just that choices exist outside the ones you were handed, that a life can be built on purpose instead of assembled by default, and that the world really is bigger than the view from where you’re standing.

I needed someone to show me that once too.

You don’t have to move into a van or cross an ocean. You don’t have to blow up the life you have in order to find the one you want.

But staying exactly where you are, out of hesitation rather than intention, shapes you too. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

Stillness is a choice. So is movement. And both of them change you, whether you’re paying attention or not.

The hardest part of that morning wasn’t the logistics. It wasn’t the packed van or the pre-dawn alarm or even the goodbye. It was the moment just before: sitting with the fact that we had decided, and that deciding meant it was real, and that real meant we were responsible for whatever came next.

That moment is the one nobody can do for you.

What I know now, from the other side of it, is that clarity didn’t come before the miles. It came because of them. We weren’t ready when we left. We became ready on the road.

If something in you is pulling, if some part of you is tired of waiting for permission, listen to it.

You don’t have to be certain. You just have to be willing.

Pull out of the driveway. Let yourself cry if you need to.

And go see what the miles make of you.

The road doesn’t promise ease. But it does offer perspective, if you let it.