The coastal drive that sold it.
You say it out loud the first time expecting to laugh it off. What if we just left for a few months? I pitched the idea to my wife, Katie. She looked at me and said, "I don't think I can live in an RV for that long." We were driving back from Oregon to California with our two kids in the back seat (not long after our son was born). Then somewhere on that coastal stretch we looked at each other again and said we could totally do this.
We wanted a stretch of time that belonged to us before life filled it back in with the usual defaults. Not a vacation. A long reset. A deliberate pause with the whole country as the backdrop. We wanted to just be. Be a husband, be a father, be a wife, be a mother, be an individual, without any attachment to work or the branding we sometimes wrapped around ourselves. I remember standing in our driveway one night, gazing up, dreaming about it.
Somehow the idea got pushed to the back burner after we agreed we could totally do this, and life took over again. During that stretch I lost my grandfather, who was very close to me. He was my companion in a lot of ways, one of my role models. Then, come November, we were watching a Netflix show and somehow the idea got brought up again. We looked at each other and said, "We should do this." Especially now, while the kids are young. In a few years they probably won't want to hang out with us. This is the time we can impact them, spend real time with them.
Pausing two careers we actually loved.
I had my dream job at StockX. Katie was climbing the corporate ladder, a VP at one of the biggest healthcare organizations. We both loved our jobs and what we had built. This was by far the craziest thing we've ever done. I remember one night, both of us saying at the same time, "Are we crazy for doing this?" But deep down it felt right. Katie put it simply: what's the worst that could happen? We come back, get jobs, and everything goes back to normal. The idea of voluntarily stepping away from a career I loved, going against everything I was wired to do was terrifying.
As an immigrant, I've always had a full-time job. Early in my career I worked two jobs through most of my teens and early twenties, and I never quit one without another lined up. The idea of pausing a career at a job I loved was crazy. But again, my heart was telling me to do it.
"Are we crazy for doing this?" We kept asking. It kept feeling right.
The day we both put in our notice was a shock. I still remember the moment I hit send. There was a rush, immediately followed by a wave of sadness. Four years. Everything I built at StockX. Gone in one click. Saying goodbye to coworkers has never been easy for me, and this time was no different.
Then I hear Katie running into the office: "I put in my notice!"
We looked at each other. Wide-eyed. Said it back and forth like we needed to hear it again to believe it. Are we crazy?
It still felt right.
In analytics, nothing is spontaneous. 98.5% of the time.
Throughout my career I have learnt that everything has to be planned and prepped. I'm ultra-realistic; my mind runs through the good and bad scenarios and how I can get ahead of them. That meant building a full financial model covering every aspect of this (I mean everything): putting the house on Airbnb, buying the RV, our finances, cost during the trip, the miles, the price of diesel, and on and on.
It also meant prepping for the scenarios that don't go well: carrying every tool for roadside repairs, researching and packing replacement parts for the RV. I designed and replaced the electrical system with lithium batteries for longer boondocking with no hookups, installed solar panels, and prepped the rig for Starlink. Getting the house ready and moving our stuff out for Airbnb was not fun, to say the least.
"Are you f#%king stupid?"
That was my father's response, an immigrant father's response, the first time I told him I was thinking about this. "You have a great job and an awesome life." I knew I'd be judged and questioned for stepping outside the norm, and sometimes that comes from the ones closest to you. I love my father and think the world of him. Just different generational thinking.
The day we were meant to leave, we were still packing. We were supposed to head out early, but with two kids, that didn't happen. My dad came over that morning and cried before we left. The plan was for our parents to join us for parts of the trip; they were going to miss the kids a lot.
In a perfect world I'd have owned the RV longer, with a few shakedown trips before something like this. Buying an RV we actually liked with the right floor plan was one of the hardest things to check off. We bought it three weeks before leaving, and in that window I had to upgrade the electrical system, retrofit bunk beds, and handle interior stuff for the kids' safety. We managed exactly one trip before we left.
I'd had the RV inspected top to bottom, and the inspector told me plainly: things will break as you travel. It's a moving house, that's just normal. Being fully prepared and a little too confident, I said, "That's not gonna be me. I'm prepared, and things will go my way."
"With this pace, there'll be nothing left of the RV." We both just laughed.
The first night, the sink broke and fell while Katie was washing baby clothes. I fixed it. Day two, the front jack that raises and lowers the rig to hitch stopped working. Pinched wires. Fixed. A few days later, a major leak under the bathroom. Fixed that too. I told Katie that at this rate there'd be nothing left of the RV and I wasn't sure we'd make it around the country. She just said, "We'll go as long as we can. It's about the journey, not a task."
Then we reached our first real destination on the Oregon coast. We met a lovely group of teachers who taught us to catch razor clams for the first time. We barbecued them around a fire and had the best time. In my head I thought, this is exactly what I was looking for. After Oregon came Washington and Idaho. We stayed with old friends, met new people who kindly let us park on their property and invited us to the microbrewery, and saw animals and places we'd never have found otherwise. And the RV stopped fighting us. It started running flawlessly.
Thirty-two states, and the pictures were the least of it.
Before we left, Katie and I had a lot of questions and what-ifs, me especially. After a few weeks, the worries started to disappear. We had no itinerary; we planned as we went. By the time we hit our stride, the "plan" was just a loose thread of parks we wanted to see and a lot of deliberate white space in between. No agenda. No tasks. We let the road and the people we met carry us where we needed to go. The locals we met would hand us recommendations, and we'd plan a few days out around the big national parks.
The places were unreal, spots we'd never in a million years have picked for a typical vacation. My kids saw animals in Yellowstone we'd never have seen otherwise. My daughter became a Junior Ranger at a few parks and was so proud of herself. My son learned to walk during the trip. And I learned to be just a father and a husband, not a husband who needs to work.
I chased fireflies with my daughter and moon-gazed for days. We read about the animals we saw on the road. She learned to help me fix the RV. We rolled around in grass fields, learned to farm (I even ran some farming equipment), stared at grazing cows and mooed back at them, played with our dog Abby on the beach. At night, after the kids went down, Katie and I would sit and talk about what we wanted for our future, not work projects and how to tackle them. The days became about us.
The RV was about 300 square feet. It was perfectly big enough.
I had a few pairs of clothes, you can see it in the photos, and couldn't have cared less. At home I had hundreds of clothes and piles of sneakers, working for the best sneaker marketplace in the world. Out there, none of it mattered.
We went across the north. Montana and its big skies were unbelievable (I learned to fly-fish there). The Dakotas were cool, especially Mount Rushmore. Minnesota was green and lush; Voyageurs, the only water-based national park, was wild and out of this world, though we did get chased out by a tornado. Yeah, crazy. We took a yacht around the Great Lakes. Down the East Coast we ate Ben & Jerry's at the factory in Vermont, saw New York City with my sister, ate a Philly cheesesteak in Philly and ran up the Rocky stairs to burn it off. We visited historical places across the South and caught the Balloon Fiesta in New Mexico.
The national parks earn their reputation. Arches at golden hour looks fake in photos. Glacier looks like another planet. We got lost in Yellowstone for a bit. At Carlsbad Caverns, we sat in the bat amphitheater at dusk and watched hundreds of thousands of bats spiral out into the sky. Hike after hike, we worked through our national parks list, I carried both kids sometimes. My daughter started doing 3–4 mile hikes without complaining. We'd study insects and stare at lakes together. Time moved slower sitting next to her, watching the horizon.
People helped us, and we helped people. I remember stopping for a French couple with kids whose cool vintage bus was overheating in the Grand Canyon. I pulled them with my truck off a dangerous stretch of road to a park ranger so they could call a tow. They were on a tour around the whole American continent. Rad.
We made friends we still keep up with today. Unintentionally, parts of the trip became about the people we were about to meet, and we'd get excited for it. Katie started a list of every place we said "we should live here." It got long, mostly towns we'd never heard of a week earlier. That's the part that stays with me: how fast the definition of home loosens once you stop sleeping in the same room every night.
You don't take the trip to see the country. You take it to see who you are without your routine.
As the time wound down, Katie kept counting the months. "We only have three left!" Then two. "I don't want to go home." This from the person who once said she couldn't travel in an RV. I saved our last stop before home for Monument Valley. We woke to one of the most spectacular sunrises and sunsets I've ever seen, in a place where so many movies were shot. In a way, this had been our own little movie.
As we drove back, Katie had tears in her eyes. Joy, and a little grief that it was over, but so happy we'd taken this time with our little family. Driving into California with the sun going down, the kids and Katie asleep, I might have shed a tear too. Joy and gratefulness that I got to share this with them. My heart was full. I was completely content with life.
