Habitual travel

learning to live the life of travel as someone who didn’t grow up vacationing

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Somewhere in the Southwest, US

On average, I travel somewhere (anywhere!) with my husband and my dog every month — typically one to two places. It’s not always somewhere far or fancy, and it may simply be a car camping trip about three hours away for one night, but we are habitually traveling every single month.

However, travel wasn’t always a part of my life. Growing up in Kansas and not traveling much meant anywhere outside the State of Oz felt exotic and adventurous. I’d seen the ocean maybe a handful of times by the time I started college. I didn’t know what PNW stood for. Outdoorsy activities were limited to lake life in adjoining states.

When my husband and I decided to start traveling full-time in 2017, one of the first things I did was snag an Instagram and Facebook account with the name Paging Adventure: @pagingadventure.

(The name comes from our last name, Page. When Sam first became a Doctor of Physical Therapy, my family thought it was funny to say “Paging Dr. Page!”)

From there, our motto became, “Answering the Call of Adventure.” It’s not a perfect metaphor — are we calling on adventure or answering it? But you get the idea.

If we go back a few years, when Sam and I first got married in 2012, we fell into a routine. An expected routine. We got married right out of college (exactly two weeks after our graduation) and the day after we got married, Sam started grad school. And we also moved to Kansas City from our lifelong home city of Wichita, KS, which is about 2.5 hours away. This was a BIG DEAL to someone like me who rarely traveled with my family growing up, and never more than for a few days and always to tourist-focused destinations. Living nearly 3 hours from my childhood home felt mature and very adult. (Is there a time when being an adult will stop feeling adult?)

Around this time, there were still repercussions from the financial crisis of 2008, and finding a job right out of college as a journalist was tough. (My degree is in Communications with an emphasis in Journalism and a minor in English. Yes, I’m a word nerd.) Sam would go to school, and I would apply for jobs. In our first three years of marriage, as just married, recent college graduates with no money, I ended up having 12 different jobs trying to pay for rent and food. (Some of those jobs included folding clothes at The Buckle, setting up book displays at Books-A-Million, Marketing Coordinator at the KC Renaissance Festival, and giving tours at a historical museum.)

During grad school, Sam learned of the opportunities to travel full-time as a Physical Therapist. He could take contract positions anywhere in the U.S. and work there for about 3 months. This was THRILLING to me. I’d gotten a taste of living outside of the bubble where I was raised and I wanted more. (Additionally, in the summer of 2014, Sam completed one of his clinical rotations for school in Nashville, TN — the first time we had moved out of state. We lived there for about 3 months. Prophetic?)

Sam graduated with his doctorate in 2015. (Proud wife moment!) Back then, remote work wasn’t nearly as common or available. Traveling full-time with Sam’s newly acquired grad school student loan debt without me working didn’t feel responsible, or even possible. So we moved back to Wichita. We created a beautiful, loving, authentic community of friends, and of course, all of our family was nearby. We love Wichita, KS — truly!

But full-time travel had taken hold of our hearts and minds. It held on tight.

Fast forward to 2017 when I landed my first fully remote job. All of the dreams of traveling full-time that we’d folded away in the dusty closets of our minds for several years finally felt possible.

Around this time, tiny houses were all the rage. So I had the plan set: build a tiny house and travel full-time in it for Sam’s contract positions. We started researching floor plans, where we would park our home, and all the extra, dreamy details that go into designing and building your home, in miniature.

Then, we discovered skoolies! People were converting old, retired school buses into tiny homes. I was in awe. In December of 2017, we purchased our beautiful Bluebird from Ponca City, OK. We spent 9 months converting this yellow school bus into the tiny home of our dreams. Then, in September 2018, we hit the road!

We lived on the coast of Oregon, in the Verde Valley of Arizona, in multiple wine countries throughout California, and in other awe-inspiring locations we were fortunate enough to call home for a few months. We would travel to other areas near where we were living— Lake Tahoe, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the Puget Sound — and each time we were blown away to be living our dream life.

Of course, the universal plot twist of 2020 brought our dreamy lifestyle to a halt. Living in a 200-square-foot home, which had originally felt like freedom, had begun to feel like a tin cage we couldn’t escape from. (Especially for me, since I worked, lived, and slept in the bus day in and day out.)

Redefining home

In 2021, after saving up for about a year, we purchased a house back in Wichita. It’s an almost 100-year-old house built in 1929 and it needed some work, to say the least. We had loved converting the bus and it felt good to have another project to put our hearts and souls into.

But the travel bug sticks with you. I’m grateful to have a home base near family and friends, but Kansas does leave a bit to be desired for those like me who believe time spent off mountains is time wasted.

From our home base, I knew we could still honor our shared value of travel. I knew we didn’t have to give up travel to live closer to family. I knew we could create a habit of traveling, exploring, and adventuring, just as we did when traveling full-time on the bus.

Colorado as a cactus, a beer, and a campsite view.

Road trips are my favorite way to travel — like last year when we took two weeks to drive to Bryce Canyon, Death Valley, wine country in Northern California, coastal Oregon, and then back home, with many other amazing destinations in between. We’ve been Jeep camping for a few years and love finding the most remote places where we don’t see another person for two days.

We call it habitual travel!

It’s not full-time, but each month we create weekends and moments of travel in our lives in some way or another — whether that’s road-tripping across the country or driving a couple of hours away for a night of camping. It’s a value we honor by organizing our lives around travel, not the other way around.

Paging Adventure is more than a brand or a name, it’s a promise.

Poem of the Week

“I hope this email never finds you” a poem by Jordan Shea Page