Welcome to Lilah on the Go!

I think we can all fairly say that the year 2020 changed us all in some way. I was working in retail for almost 12 years, and Kevin in the restaurant industry for 19 years. I realized quickly how dispensable my job was after it shut down for weeks on end with no pay, and as I was at home most days, a lot of thoughts started to surface as to what was really important. I had put all of myself into this job, and it all got taken away so quickly with such unknown if it would ever come back. I didn’t want to feel as if I was wasting anymore of my time, because that’s what it had felt like, wasted years. We reopened after some time, but it was never really the same.

Kevin started working daytime shifts remodeling the restaurant he worked in, as they had to close as well. It was such a difference from his usual late-night shifts. He started to realize how coming home those late nights (or early mornings, really) and sleeping into the day wasn’t sustainable. I mean, who are we kidding here? We aren’t getting any younger!

We were barely seeing each other, and we were putting all of our energy into everything else except ourselves and we started to wonder why and how can we fix it?

Traveling had always been something we loved to do, and we usually flew. Being at home during Covid we started watching YouTube channels of people traveling and out seeing the United States. I was shocked at how many places I had never even heard of or knew existed. And it was in our own country!

And WOW! - How everything opened up once we realized that there was a whole community of people that lived in RV’s, drove around the country, visited national parks and didn’t care about materialistic things. As we started to open our eyes and look around at our own house and lives, it seemed we had found our answer. Then the questions started rising immediately. Could we do this? How could we do this? Would we love it? Hate it? (Spoiler alert- we loved it!)

Towards the end of 2020, we flew to Denver to visit with family and friends, and we slowly started bringing up the idea how we wanted to just get away for a year and take some time for ourselves. It sounded like a strange unattainable dream saying it out loud for the first time, but it also sounded more and more doable as we kept talking about it. I don’t remember any specific definitive moment where we said, “okay, we’re doing this” to each other…Over the next year, it just gradually became this is what we are going to do. Telling people and purchasing a camper was next on our list.

We go up to Georgia every year in January to visit with a good friend for Kevin’s birthday. In 2022 we went up and brought our new family member, Luke, a yellow lab, who was just ten weeks old at the time. Our friend was the first person we told our plans to, and it all just spiraled from there. We were leaving beginning of August to travel around the country, stopping at National Parks, state parks, visiting with family, and friends. I am a planner at heart, and I got on it! I booked our first campground in Tennessee before we had even purchased a camper. We found the perfect travel trailer for us in March and we actually ended up deciding to put our house on the market about a month before we were leaving. That was never in the original plan, but we were all in at this point.

Fast forward to January of 2024…We had decided to stay in Tennessee for a while. We had been all over the country, and then traveling around the southeast states ever since we sold our house in early 2023. We fell in love with the weather, the landscape, the people. About two months of being there we find out we are having a baby! And what a surprise that was. We decided to move back to Florida since we were residents of that state, but on the opposite coast in Cape Coral. So, here we are with our beautiful daughter, Lilah, our dog, Luke, and a brand-new house! (And of course we kept the camper).