Introduction Part 2: Struggles and making it work

Hello and welcome back to the Nomad Dad Life! If you haven’t read the first introduction to our travel journey post please do so here: https://www.nomaddadlife.com/introduction/

St. Cloud, Minnesota, is not exactly the best location for the warm weather we were looking for. Technically it was south of our former home. . . but it also at least a couple hundred or thousand miles short of where we were initially thinking. Instead of palm trees we still had the cold winter breeze. There was still plenty of snow on the ground at our first “travel” destination. Why would we choose a location so close to home when we could go pretty much anywhere in the country? There was some method behind the madness, believe it or not.

Reality Check

Everyone knows life isn’t perfect, even if people try to make it seem that way on social media. I’m going to share our struggles as much as the things we have enjoyed. Minnesota wasn’t our first choice for where we wanted to start traveling. It did, however, make a lot of sense for us to do it that way. Not everything can be unicorns and rainbows in life. If you look back usually things work out how they are supposed to. This post is going to wrap up the introduction before we get into our travel journey. I feel like it’s important to share the struggles, and how much uncertainty this was going to be for our family.

Reasons behind the madness

We wanted to be close by when we finalized the sale of our house. This allowed us more time to go through our things to decide what we wanted to bring with us, what was going to be stored, sold, donated, and what could be taken to the landfill. It also allowed us plenty of time to get our house cleaned after we were already moved out. It’s very hard to keep a house clean enough to sell when you have kids and dogs. The kids destroy things way faster than they can get put back together. For anyone with dogs inside they know dog hair gets everywhere. We have yellow labs, fun fact about them. They only shed their fur twice a year, for 6 months in the winter and 6 months in the summer!

Some of the actual madness

I was able to transition from working in the office full time to working remotely full time. We were still close enough to my office, so I could make a trip there occasionally if I needed to, which I did have to do a couple of times. I should mention now that work was a mess. The timing of our decision was not a very good one. I was the fiscal supervisor for a county social services department. Our social services department merged with a neighboring social services department to form a new agency on 1/1/2022. Because we were two separate counties, we had two separate sets of accounting records. We couldn’t combine them into one until after our agency was technically formed.

The counties had always done the payroll for our departments, but we were taking that duty on now. We didn’t have a payroll system, and we had never run it before. So now on top of creating a whole new chart of accounts for our new agency we had to get a payroll system set up so everyone else in the agency could get paid on January 21^st. On top of that, one of our most valuable employees was going to be on maternity leave soon. There was just so much to do and not enough time to do it.

With all of this going on it was nice to be able to go into the office when needed. It allowed my staff a little time to adjust to my new schedule of not being in the office every day. Thankfully, I had an amazing team who worked with my schedule. They were open to allowing me to try this. After the board approved my working remotely with a flexible schedule, I had a meeting with my team to discuss the new plan. I didn’t want to try it if they weren’t ok with it.

I explained to them the situation and left the meeting so they could talk about it openly with each other without me there. They were on board with it, so I would be beginning my new schedule as soon as my wife’s first contract started at the end of February. I would only be able to work when my wife had the day off or after the kids went to bed.

Figuring out the process

This experience allowed us to do a trial run of how traveling would work with kids. There would be a lot of downsizing to do to get everything we needed from a 4-bedroom home to just the essentials we would be able to bring in our two vehicles. A pickup and a crossover SUV were what we had to fit enough of our belongs to be able live for the next 2 ½ years. We had considered purchasing a trailer and hauling that around, but with gas prices the way they were, I didn’t want my truck to get worse mileage than it already had. The next best option was to purchase a topper for my truck. This way we could pile more stuff in the box without worrying about it falling out. We could lock it so our belongings would be secure as well.

What worked best for us was purchasing totes for most of our streamlined belongings. We each got one tote for our clothes, the kids got a tote for some toys, and we had one with personal items we wanted to keep with us. We were able to stack the totes two high in the box of my truck and still have room for a bike and the pack and play our youngest would be sleeping in until she was big enough to sleep in a bed.

With two child seats in the back seat of my truck there wasn’t much room for anything else, but we were able to get our travel bags in there. Our other vehicle would be packed with the kids, a cooler, some toys to keep them busy when we were driving, and their snack and diaper bags.

Time to Adjust

Being so close to home also allowed us plenty of time for our families to process what we were about to do and give us plenty of time for the “Minnesota Goodbye.” For people not familiar with this, it’s always a process to leave someone’s house; you typically start saying goodbye 30 minutes before you leave. It’s a real thing! Google it! Anyway, this allowed our kids to spend time with their grandparents before we started moving all over the country as well as aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Starting our traveling off in a familiar area also removed a lot of stress. With all this new unknown we were diving into, we didn’t have an unfamiliar location on top of trying to figure out how to make this all work. If we didn’t think this would work out for our family, my wife could have gone back to her old job, I still had mine so I could have gone back to working in the office, and things could have gone back to normal quickly if we needed them to. We knew the area would be a good, safe neighborhood for our kids. This is our main priority during our travels.

It was a good transition for our kids. They moved to a new place but still had a lot of familiarity around them. We were still close to our family so they could still see them, we could still go to the places and parks they enjoyed going to and the could still see the friends they had grown up with so far.

We have two dogs that are staying with one sister-in-law while we are traveling. The kids were still able to go and see them whenever they wanted. It was not an easy decision to leave our dogs with my wife’s sister. . . But they were raised in the country. It would have been tough for them to adapt to city life. Plus they would have spent hours cramped in the vehicle with us and all of our stuff. This way they got a farm so they could run free.

New Normal

The hospital my wife would be working at was the one she first started out at when she was an LPN. She knew her way around the area, what traffic would be like, where she needed to go once she got to the hospital. She even knew some of the people she would be working with. The adjustment for her was probably easier than it was for me.

I was used to working my 7:30-4 Monday through Friday. Now I had to work around her schedule and the kids. Most days I wouldn’t even get to start working until 8 or 9 at night and finishing up around 3 or 3:30 in the morning. That made for a lot of short nights when the kids wake up around 7 every morning.

Of course the days she had off were easier for me to get my hours in working. We knew those would also be the only days we would be able to do something as a family. We wanted to make sure we had time to explore when we went to areas we haven’t been. I knew I didn’t want to only work the days she had off. We wouldn’t get to enjoy our travel experience then.

Main takeaway

Minnesota might not have been our first choice, but it was the best choice to start our journey. We’ve learned there isn’t a perfect time to do something you want. Sometimes you have no choice but to make it work. It can be a struggle to make that work but looking back it’s always worth it. If there is something you want to do or try do it now. Don’t wait for the perfect time because it won’t happen.

The next installment of the Nomad Dad life will begin getting into the places we went. We will let you know if we would or wouldn’t recommend them to someone visiting the area.

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