Driving the Length of the Telescope

From Jacob:

To our family and friends: thank you for your interest, love, support, and prayers. (To the random blog surfer who has somehow found this page: hello!)

As most of you know, my wife and I met ten years ago at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. Our friendship was written on the pages of backstage camaraderie, enhanced by a love of stories well told, and made permanent by the ability to laugh at the same morons, often ourselves.

Along with a rich and adventurous life together, something less lovely developed over the next decade. Though we got married, worked on movies, traveled the country, and went to Disney World half a dozen times, we felt a quiet, desperate emptiness growing inside. My perspective is tiny but I sensed a few things happening.

One was a loss of rhythm between us. My job at Cafe Bossa Nova was perhaps the best of my life, working for and with amazing people, but it required being on my feet for hours at a time, and I came home physically drained though full of stories. Leighann took an office job that found her getting up early, sitting in a cubicle all day, then coming home emotionally drained but ready to move, make, and do. It was almost funny how perfectly positioned we were for disconnection.

A bigger issue was a loss of hope. When we met she was working at a theatre professionally and I was nurturing plans to become a filmmaker. Some successes and failures later, we were waiting tables and punching an office clock, respectively, and felt less certain than ever what exactly we wanted to do with our lives.

Call it a third-of-life crisis. (Or probably don't.)

We needed to find each other again (and maybe find ourselves) and the first step seemed a change of vocation. We checked help wanted ads and websites. We brainstormed and daydreamed. We put our dilemma before some of you and were asked questions like, "If money were no object, what is the one thing you would do?" We didn't even know that.

Except...

Whenever we got in the car and drove, it felt right. We felt like we should keep going until we ran out of road. Like we should drive until we found an ocean, didn't matter which one. 

We felt.

It turns out we'd been saving for a trip to Europe. I remember talking about this at the beginning of our marriage and then it had slipped into some closet in the back of my mind, where I keep cousins' birthdays and thank you notes I mean to write. Leighann's complex partitioning system kept the Europe fund out of my sight, and I didn't realize how much we put into it over the years. A testament to her financial discipline: more than I ever saved before meeting her.

The thing about Europe is that it's really expensive to fly there. And the dollar is weaker than the Euro. And we know very few people.

We looked at a map of the USA, and did some calculations on how much gas we could buy with the cost of European airfare. I checked and doubled-checked the number. It had to be wrong.

Twenty-Thousand Miles...

So instead of flying abroad we put new tires on the car and plotted a flexible driving course around North America. 

We are at the beginning of a new chapter, a journey beyond expectations, there and maybe back again. We don't know what we want to do, or what we're meant to do. But we know that we love automobile rides. And each other.

We'll keep you posted.