The Next Phase…

As Seen on Facebook –

Terri, Brian, Sam & Max Duncan, The Next Phase…
So last week, we moved to Colorado! Ahhhh!
Since Christmas, it has been quite the whirlwind, so please forgive us for not updating you sooner.
We got here, rural Rifle, Colorado, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, last Monday. We will be here for the next 3.5 months.
How did we get here?
In June of 2014, I left my nursing job at Johns Hopkins to stay home with the boys full-time. Max was getting ready to start kindergarten in the fall, so I would be homeschooling both boys, and as I told my boss when I resigned, I was feeling very stretched, like a jack of all trades, but master of none (homeschooling, no family time together, no Brian/Terri time together, homeschool co-op responsibilities & commitments, my acute patients at work, and trying to be a kind & sane person, etc.).
Brian has also been wanting to get his multimedia business “samax media, llc” up & running, so that we could have more family time together. With me working 24 hour weekends for the past 7 years, our family time together was almost non-existent. We wanted more. We were all too frequently reminded of the fragility of life. I entered my 40’s, evaluated the meaning of my experiences, evolved and grew in my realization of what is truly important in my life. We have decided to live intentionally, today, in the moment, and not wait for someday that may never come. We have had enough “close calls” and I have learned to heed their message. We have been witness to terrible tragedies, tough losses and lessons learned from the experiences of both complete strangers (Luck2Tuck, Zach Sobiech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zxXAtmmLLc), as well as loved ones, to help us see how important it is to use the time we have together wisely and in doing the things we love, with the ones we love.
My dear friend, Valerie Mae posted this just today on her facebook page, and it’s so fitting for where we are right now.
“I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest” – a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: “If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself… then truth will not be withheld from you.” Or so I’ve come to believe.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
We are not guaranteed another moment in this life, and if I survive it (!), we have maybe 12 years left with the boys. Then, they will go off and make their own adult lives, hopefully well armed with the tools they will need to not only survive, but thrive in this world. Not long after that, they’ll have partners and families of their own; so selfishly, I am going to take every moment I can get with them now, while they still have to be with me!
Sooooooo….almost two years ago we began downsizing. We moved out of our home of 11 years, began renting a two bedroom apartment (thanks Melissa!), and sold and gave away many of our things, to help free us from the stuff. It has definitely been a process, and at times it’s been very difficult and emotional, letting go of the stuff and becoming carefree from societies expectations for how we live our lives.
We knew, for Brian to be able to really commit all his time and energy in growing his business, he’d have to leave his comfortable job of more than a decade. He set a tentative resignation date of January 1, 2015, and in December when that date was quickly approaching, we decided it was time to take the leap. With homeschooling the boys, freeing ourselves from all the stuff tying us down, being a nurse (can work anywhere), and Brian starting his own web-based business, we were ideally set up for traveling full-time. We’re broke though, so how do we see the world as a family? Introducing our other new business….We4DoExplore house & pet sitting.
On Christmas eve I created our family profile on several house sitting websites (there are tons of opportunities out there!) to help us search for jobs throughout the country. Within 2 days we had homeowners contacting us to come and sit for them. By the 1st week of January, the ball really started rolling, and we committed to a four month house/pet sit in rural Rifle, Colorado, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, and I had 3 weeks to go through the rest of our stuff, decide what we should keep, and get the four of us and our cat, packed and prepared to move more than 1800 miles across the country (Thankfully we had the help of some amazing friends Jen & Chad W., Valerie Mae Wright & Undrea, Elizabeth & Geoff, Betty, and Geoffrey.)
Brian put in his notice on January 5th, and on Friday January 23rd at 4pm we left Maryland for Colorado, leaving behind three 5×8 storage pods (courtesy of a very dear friend and her husband’s business Wollenwebers Trucking) full of stuff and mementos, a big mess at home (sorry Melissa!), and went down to one car – the Subaru, to climb the mountains, and whatever we could fit in a 36 sqft trailer. That’s it. That’s our life now. And we are so excited to share it together, and with you. We hope that you will check our website for updates on our travels and adventures as We4DoExplore and let us know if you know someone who can use our services. We hope to see you again soon when we’re back on the East Coast.
I have a new phone number (google voice) so please private message me if you’d like it, and as we are situated between Rifle Gap in the beautiful Rocky Mountains, we have zero cell signal, so no calls or texts get through, and very limited (400mb/day!) wifi, so I connect about once a day to quickly check my email. Please be patient if we don’t reply right away, but we have to say we are enjoying some disconnected, family time.