One year making memories - a lifetime to remember them!

One year ago today we left our home and headed East on a nearly year-long exploration, unsure where exactly we'd go and when we'd return. We planned on documenting our experiences on this blog as we went. After all, we'd be doing a lot of driving, Tricia quit her job to focus on this, our commitments to charitable service would be constrained from our normal routines, and the kids were enrolled in online classes that were designed for flexibility for exactly this purpose. Plenty of time to write up some blog posts, right? Ummm, yeah - that's not how it turned out.

"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can on it." - Danny Kaye

Danny described our year perfectly - a year of opportunity to paint fantastic memories and we threw everything we could into it! Along the way, time spent writing blog posts became time not spent doing something we couldn't do again later - so it quickly became something we chose to defer so we could devote the time to experiencing everything we could. 

As a result, we'll be looking through the lens of continuous 1-year anniversaries. We'll intentionally take the next year to document the trip, and we're eager for that! We looking forward to reliving the memories by retelling the stories during the seasons in which they originally occurred. We invite you to join us in reading bite-size stories of our "Epic East Coast Adventure"!

Tricia, Jeffrey, Candace & Carter

6 hours in Paris

On our way back from our AMAZING trip to Norway 🇳🇴, we got to have a 6 hour layover in Paris, France!! 🇫🇷 While there, we got to visit Sacre Coeur, Arc de Triomph, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower! Here are a few interesting facts about these awesome places:

This is Sacre Coeur! It is a huge, iconic Roman Catholic church. that was consecrated in 1919. La Basilique du Sacre Coeur de Montmartre has the largest Mosiac in France.

This is the Arc de Triomph!

This is Notre Dame!

This is the Louvre! Well, some of it. The Louvre

You may know this one 😉. This is the Eiffel Tower! Paris, France is most famous for this engineered masterpiece built by Thomas Eiffel in .

School with a view 😉

I got to attend my online school classes in Central Park, NY!! 🤩😲

The image above is the Gapstow Bridge! This quaint stone bridge is located in Central Park, NY. A wooden bridge with cast iron railings was originally built there in 1874, but couldn't handle the test of time and weather. In 1896, it was replaced with this rustic stone beauty.

Fram Museum, Oslo Norway

This is an amazing museum! It contains two record setting wooden ships that were used in some amazing adventures of their own - each accomplishing unbelievable things in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

How would you feel if you were traveling in a wooden ship that got caught in a batch of icebergs and had to spend an entire winter floating in the icepack circling the north (or south) pole in the dead of winter? And... would you do this intentionally? These explorers did exactly that.

The Fram was used in three different expeditions, each of them setting new records in approaching the North or South poles as well as mapping previously unknown territories in the icy caps of our planet. This ship made two trips to the Arctic region and one to the Antarctic region. 

The museum also houses the ship Gjøa, the first ship to successfully navigate the long-sought Northwest Passage (traveling west from Norway over the northern shores of Canada and reaching the Bering strait. 

You can read the amazing stories of these expeditions (and more) on the museum website here: https://frammuseum.no/

We spent several hours exploring here, and highly recommend it if you are in the area. It is fascinating what these turn of the century explorers accomplished, and the fortitude they displayed in the face of so much adversity!

The Fram's bow with our cousins who live in Norway.

Jeffrey

All packed up and ready to go....

Today we locked our last box of personal items into a storage unit, changed the bedsheets and locked the doors to our home. Then we drove our first of what would become more than 25000 miles before seeing our home again!

We've long felt the walls of our home are infused with love, but the kids wants to give it one last hug before turning off the lights, triggering Eco mode on our thermostat, and heading to the suburban waiting in the garage.

Our storage unit was packed with equal parts personal treasures and unfinished projects that will have to wait for a "someday" to arrive. Our adventure was calling us and it was time to answer.... 

Fueling up and pondering "how much is this trip going to cost?" It's probably best we underestimated the number of miles we ended up driving.... but in the end it was worth every penny!