So we are a few days from leaving Augusta, Georgia and heading to Austin, Texas and many of you are asking us how did we get here? Well, it started a few months ago. Our son Chris decided that he was moving to Utah. He went out and found some hard labor employment, made a few hundred dollars, loaded up in a friends car and headed west. He knew that if he did not do it now, take a crazy chance, he never would.

This in turn inspired Dianne. Dianne has always wanted to travel. She talked about doing it for vacations, but for one reason or another it never seemed to happened. One evening she started talking about travel nursing. I ‘entertained’ her and told her to research it. I really did not see how we could do it. Us? Give it all up? Start over? Crazy!!!

But the more she researched the more excited she got. Even Bradley was excited in the very beginning. To her it became less of an ‘if we could do it’ and more or a ‘when we could do it’. For me it became the realization that she was really serious. It also meant that to do it I would have to give up my career. I would have to hang up the badge and gun. Could I really do this? We began to pray for the insight to know if this was what we should do. The feeling we both received was that we should. So, I began to crunch the numbers. I began to see that we could do it. In fact, it would be a benefit to us financially to do it.

We began the planning. Realizing our lease was up August 31 we needed to get something lined up quickly. The goal was to stay in a local motel, at most, a few days before moving to her first assignment. Yard sales had to be planned. Inventorying what we wanted to take, what we wanted to put in storage, what we wanted to sell and what we wanted to just get rid of became our daily life. Although looking back now, it was quite liberating to just get rid of all the junk we had accumulated.

Bradley became less enthused. He began to mope knowing that he would be leaving his friends, family and everything he knew. He was almost 17. To him giving up everything he knew was a big deal. Adding insult to injury was the idea that he could only take some of his things. And then him becoming home schooled, with me as his teacher, even made him less excited.

Then the issue of getting an assignment began to become a headache. Applying for different states nursing licenses, fingerprint card after fingerprint card being submitted, waiting for documents to be reviewed, background checks needed conducted, and the endless interviews for different positions from Wala Wala, Washington to Boston, Massachutes. But no offers…..