One Week In!

Hello everyone, and welcome to Wanderlust on Wheels! Ian and I created this blog to share our adventures. You see, about a year ago, we started tossing around a crazy idea. Let me tell you a bit about it.

I’m Naomi, and Ian is my husband. We’re adventure-loving explorers who haven’t had much freedom in the last few years. Ian left the Navy in 2021 and went back to work as an engineering project manager soon after, and I’m still in the Navy. We’ve spent quite a bit of time being told where to go and where to live, when we can have time off and when we can’t. Holidays missed, birthdays forgotten, and little time to spend with our families.

Back in 2021, my situation changed drastically. My dad passed away unexpectedly, and my mental health spiraled. My physical health went with it. Thanks to one officer looking out for me on the ship, I was transferred to shore duty to have a more stable situation to get the help I needed. It was also an eye-opening moment. The job my dad was so proud of me for doing – the job that kept me away every Christmas, the job that kept me living across the country, and that limited me from seeing him, had taken away what turned out to be the last time I could have spent with him. Suddenly, being around family meant more to us than it did before.

After a year of being on shore duty, my mental health doing much better, but my physical health still suffering, Ian and I decided we needed a change. I got the news that I would be medically retired due to some physical limitations I had developed, and we suddenly had all the options in the world. We weren’t sure where we wanted to settle down. There were so many choices! So many great cities in the US that we hadn’t even been to! How in the world can you choose one city to live in when you don’t even know your options?

So, picture this. Ian and I, after a long holiday season with his family in Colorado, are fifteen hours into the eighteen-hour drive home. Our carsick furry friend, Mir, an eighty-pound Dutch Shepherd with a very sensitive stomach, was in the back seat, and by this point, he was pretty irritated with us. In my head, an idea had been forming, and I'd been googling it for the last three hours. I took the chance and tossed out the idea that changed everything. What if we bought a trailer? What if - and this is a huge what if – what if we got remote jobs and became digital nomads? Ian was dumbstruck. He’d never driven anything bigger than a Jeep; our dog couldn’t go 15 minutes in the car without throwing up, and Ian thought I had finally lost my mind.

Well, a year later, and here we are! One week into our new life. We did it! We bought a trailer, we remodeled said trailer, we downsized from a 950 sqft apartment in downtown San Diego to a 8x26 foot box with a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bed. We packed the trailer, discovered we had way too much stuff, packed the back of the truck, still had too much stuff, and then got rid of a tiny amount of it. We spent a year talking with our vet and testing car sickness treatments for Mir. And in the last week, we worked from our little dinette, went to three campgrounds, a cute and quaint little town in the mountains, did yoga in a drop-in studio, and found a great new brewery that we’ll unfortunately probably never return to. So stick with us! We have a lot to share about ourselves, our path to the trailer, and our path in the trailer. I promise it’ll be fun, and we’ll be honest with you all. There will be ups and downs, and we’ll do our best to share everything in between.