1 Year Later

Yesterday marked 1 year since we embarked on our big adventure. We’ve seen and learned so much over the last 365 days and we’ve enjoyed almost every moment so we wanted to share our biggest takeaways and highlights with y’all.

Highlights

We did A LOT of things in the last year, but we’ve tried to narrow down our top five favorite experiences, so here it goes:

• AC is a much better romantic than I am and she planned some great surprise dates! My two favorites were our stop at the llama and alpaca farm in Montana and the Dutch oven cooking class in South Dakota. Surprisingly, you can still keep your relationship fresh even when you spend 24/7 together!
• What’s a trip without some good food?!  I wouldn’t consider myself a foodie, but I can recall 3 meals from this trip that currently have a place in my top ten list.
  • The Girl and Fig: we stopped here on our drive through Sonoma for an anniversary dinner and it was amazing! AC said it made her list of top 5 meals ever.
  • The Bear, The Fish, The Root, and The Berry: this is a restaurant in Osooyos, Canada offers dishes inspired by the Okanagan Nation.
  • The Dandelion Cafe: our Canadian hosts treated us to dinner at this small locally-owned French restaurant right in 100 Mile House, Canada. The food did not disappoint!
• We spent 6 winter weeks in the mountains of New Mexico and enjoyed the true winter experience. We got multiple feet of snow, we hit the ski slopes several times, and AC got to shoot her first elk (of which there is still plenty in our freezer). Since both of us are from the south, it was nice to enjoy a white winter for a season (though we don’t recommend a snowboard accident!!!).
• We were reminded of all the good in the world. From strangers extending unmatched hospitality as a Hipcamp Host in South Dakota or showing interest in our story in the Jiffy Lube in Spokane; to our homestead hosts accommodating my gluten free preference and my work schedule, and supporting our success by sharing their knowledge; to friends and family sending us surprise gifts, hosting us (and flexing schedules to host us last minute when we had unexpected accidents), folks meeting up with us on our route for a meal or a hike, and cheering us on with blog comments and love on our Instagram, and especially to our parents who took us in for much longer than planned, thank you all! The world is in a weird place right now, but there is still a lot of good out there.
• Finding our homestead was far and away our top highlight! The entire point of our trip was to prepare us for this moment and it finally happened.

Takeaways

We learned too much to sum it all up in a list of only 5 takeaways, so here’s 6:

1. Sheep are stupid, pigs will eat you, and rabbit tastes pretty good! So we marked off two potential animals for our homestead and added one! All of these things we learned at our first and favorite farm in Canada. Our friends Olivier and Karla taught us so much in the two short weeks we were with them and we can’t wait to go back and visit. Olivier is still betting that we’ll change our minds about sheep…don’t hold your breath, sir.
2. Our country is beautiful. There are so many different landscapes to explore and the National Parks are a wonderful treasure. If you haven’t explored many yet, we highly recommend buying an annual pass and visiting a park or 5 for your next vacation. We were most surprised by Oregon. Don’t get me wrong, Montana and the California coast were also beautiful, but we expected those. Oregon surprised us! That state has it all: coast, mountains, forest, a National Park…what more could you need?! Shout out to Ruthann and Sam from our Oregon farm stay.
3. We don’t need as much as we think. We lived out of a pickup truck for 7 months and were perfectly content. I’m actually surprised at how precisely we packed–aside from one extra tote of clothes that we didn’t use (*cough cough* AC), we never found ourselves needing anything that we didn’t already have in our 40ish square feet of truck space. Now that we have a house again, we’ve noticed that we’re falling back into the habit of filling space with things, but, as AC says, “material things may fill a space, but not your heart” so we’ll declutter again in the near future.
4. Learning never ends. And there are so many ways to learn. You can learn from experience; that was the whole point of our journey! We stayed on farms with folks of various ages, backgrounds, and experiences and formed relationships that we can lean on throughout our homesteading life. You can learn through failure, like when you turn your back on an animal and get rammed in the butt or nipped in the arm. Lesson learned.  You can also learn from your community. I’ve recently found my local chapter of the National Ladies Homestead Gathering and I’ve already learned some great tips and tricks from that group! We also met some neighbors and learned a lot about the history of our land. ABL, friends: always be learnin’.
5. Adaptability and resiliency are a must! Not just for homesteading, but for life. If your breaks go out in the middle of your trip, or you rip your shoulder apart in a snowboarding accident, or your carefully laid plans for what to fix/build first get completely shuffled, you have to be able to pivot, regroup, and keep moving forward.
6. Life is short. Don’t wait to make the call, schedule the meetup, take the leap, do the thing. We had been dreaming and “what-if-ing” of this life for a couple of years, but were hesitant to make the first move. When we finally decided to take a chance on ourselves it was scary, but it has paid off many times over. Whatever it is that you’re dreaming about, stop putting it off. I know that is so much easier said than done, but we hope that our story shows you what’s possible when you find that courage and do that thing.

We could not have made it through this past year without all of the love and support of our family and friends. Thank you all, and here’s to another great year ahead!

Until next time,

Charli