This past week, we’ve been getting ready for Pesach:

Passover starts tonight, and the seder table is set:

Happy Passover!

It all started in the fall of 2012.  We were in the middle of our 2012 Vacation in the Florida Keys.  After another beautiful sunset, Trish said “why don’t we do this full time?”.  For the next nine months, we prepared for the trip, both excited and worried.  Worried about how the kids would adjust, worried about homeschooling, worried about leaving our perfectly good jobs behind.

In August of 2013, we drove away from our rented-out home and headed west.  For nine-hundred and eighty-four days, we traveled this amazing, vast continent.  We’ve climbed sand dunes and glaciers, walked beneath the world’s tallest trees, and touched the Arctic Ocean.  We’ve strolled though a Mexican village, visited our nation’s capital, and panned for gold in the Yukon Territory beneath the midnight sun.  Personally, I’ve had the time to bicycle many of the toughest cycling climbs in the US, and I realized my dream, now over thirty years in the making, of owning and flying a PPG.  In the mean time, our children have both grown up so much, in so many ways.  And we’ve come closer as a family.

And now it’s over.

We’re currently parked in our driveway here in New York.  As of now, our plan is to aggressively triage our belongings into a single 26-foot moving truck and then move to Phoenix, Arizona.  There are good schools there for M and B, and we will be near our parents.  I’ve always loved the desert, and I think the rest of the family has come to appreciate its rugged beauty too.  Our plan is to somehow be able to travel during the summers, to leave behind the monsoon thunderstorms of Phoenix’s summer and travel to places yet unvisited.  We hope to share those travels with you here.

I considered continuing blogging daily until we arrived in Phoenix, which would be the end not only of the trip, but of this chapter of our life-journey as well, but I don’t think I could stand writing a blog post titled “Day 1045: Packing, Day 46”, nor do I think you would want to read it.  I will continue to blog trips we take, as well as bike rides or PPG flights or RV modifications of note, but daily blogging will likely not return until we begin our westward drive to Phoenix.  If you like, you can sign up for blog updates via E-mail, or receive updates by liking our Facebook page or following our Instagram page.

So here in the driveway our RV sits.  And even though we’re here in the outer suburbs of New York City, when I close my eyes, I can still imagine us parked on some patch of lonely desert in the middle of nowhere, the scent of sagebrush and Palo Verde in the air, looking to the distant horizon beneath a vibrant sunset, with only the sound of the wind for company.

Are you there with me?  I hope you are.