What's In A Domain Name

Our site has been basically good to go (at least to share with close family and friends) for about two weeks now, but only one thing is holding us back: the name!

For almost as long as we've been planning the trip, we've been half-jokingly calling it the Millennial Falcon, as a wink to the fact that we are completely self-aware that leaving our respectable jobs and beautiful apartment in a wonderful city in order to live in a van for a year is a totally obnoxious Millennial thing to do. (Insert argument here about whether we really qualify as Millennials because we remember Life Before The Internet and we're different than people more than five years younger than us but we're not Gen Xers either etc etc etc.) Problem was, every time we said it out loud, it induced a collective groan (and not in a "that pun is so bad it's good" sort of way). Plus, see note above about whether we're even Millennials.

In the meantime, the Millennial Falcon was made into a (pretty terrible) meme, and now it seems off the table for good. 

But oh, what shall it be? A rose by any other name...

We've spent hours combing through domain name sites trying to come up with something that sits in the middle of the Venn diagram of clever, unique, and available. Such witty options include: happycampervan, vanomads, vanderers, vanfrancisco, vantasticjourney/vantasticvoyage, thevanimals, runrunrunjump, van solo (keeping with the Star Wars theme), vanderlust (like wanderlust but with a van pun), schmooze cruise, gallivant schmallivant, and datvandoe. 

...We may have our other strengths, but coming up with puntastic names may not be one of them.

Route Planning

Mike spent hours yesterday planning and organizing our potential route.

Because the main goal of this trip is to create time to bond and spend quality time with our family, including the ones we haven't historically had many opportunities to really get to know, we're planning the main stops around all of the places where we have family. Which turns out to be a lot.

When we put those into the map, along with all of the places we'd like to sight-see and be tourists, it put our trip at 14 months! It's pretty difficult to decide how long to stay in each place. Even on such a long trip, there are so many places to go, and so many people we'd like to spend time with; it never feels like enough. And it's really hard to anticipate how we'll feel in each place, and how long we'll want to stay once we're actually there.

Mike would like to stay a full six weeks at his family's cabin in Michigan. I've never even been there, so it's hard to know whether I'll find it peaceful and relaxing or whether I'll get stir crazy and feel isolated if we're there for so long. I'm hoping we can convince some family and friends to come visit us up there; that would be a blast.

We also realized that, after Chicago, there are no specific places we need to be or people we need to see, so there's no point in planning where we go after that. We can either keep going, and hit Wyoming, Seattle, Portland. Or we can come back to San Francisco and try to do those places later. Or we can go back to places we want to revisit, like places where my family lives, since at that point it'll have been almost a year since I saw them last. Or we might even decide to move somewhere else to settle down!

As of now, with the tentative route we've laid out, we'd be leaving in Oct 2017, hitting Texas for Christmas, Atlanta in March 2018, the cabin in July, and ending in Chicago in September.

Uploaded by Tinker Trailer on 2017-09-03.

Wanderlust (Or, Van-derlust?)

We've been talking about this trip for about six months now, but it's now just starting to feel real. The plan, generally, is to take a year around the country in a van (or RV), with the hope and intention of spending the majority of the time with our families, who are spread all over the US. 

So far, the talk has been in the forms of dreams and guarded conversations. But Mike just started doing research on vans for sale, and found one that seems pretty cool down in San Diego. One of the long-standing debates (that is still ongoing) is whether to get a camper van, an RV, or something else. A van is smaller, easier to park and stay incognito, and has a cool-factor that an RV just never will. But there's no bathroom, and it will be hard to re-sell when we're done (if we want to re-sell) so it might be a harder hit financially. An RV would probably be bigger and more comfortable, and have a bathroom, and would be easier to re-sell. But it would be harder to get around, harder to find places to park it, and we'd probably feel more like retirees than a young couple on an adventure (not that that's necessarily a bad thing). Mike pointed out that, either way, buying our van/RV would end up costing about the same as a year of rent for our place in San Francisco, so there's not much savings there, to my surprise. 

It's exciting, most definitely. But also a little scary, of course. Our main sadness is the thought of leaving this apartment. It's a great place, at a (relatively) great price, and the decision to give up the apartment is basically a decision not to come back to San Francisco afterwards, because it would be too expensive once we got back. Neither of us really want to make that commitment, and the thought of not at least having the option to come back makes us sad. Currently brainstorming ways we might be able to keep the apartment while we're gone.

Other than that, we've started talking about our route, and when we'd be leaving. Mike will have to figure out work (either staying at his current job but negotiating the ability to work remotely, or just finding something new, or doing something entirely on his own). That means he can't really talk about the trip at work yet. So far, his coworkers know we're shopping for a van. But they don't know about the trip. The logical conclusion is that he will be giving up his rent controlled apartment in San Francisco to live in a van... on the streets of San Francisco? And has somehow convinced his girlfriend to live with him in a van down by the river? Which I think is hilarious. The story has spun out of his control, and he doesn't know how to reign it in. On my end, I'm hoping that my employees will be trained up and ready to keep the place afloat once I take off, so I can work remotely and they can take care of anything that needs to be done in person.