How this all came about

This adventure started with a dissatisfaction with the way things had been going for our family.  No matter what we did, we always seemed to come up short financially.  My wife and I both had good jobs, I was a Quality Assurance tech., and she worked in marketing for a good company.  We were always working for something better.  Better meant more money, a better house, a better car, a sweet vacation.  Better didn't really mean better for our little family.  With all of the time spent working and struggling to make things "better", we started to loose the closeness we wanted.  I had become tired of the rat race and asked if my wife wanted to just leave it all behind for a while and see what happens.  This was not what she wanted to hear.  She is not a fan of change.
A few years went by and the financial mess that has effected so many people globally finally got a hold of us.  We lost our home and had to make a move into a rental.  My employer cut hours and benefits.  I became more and more frustrated with our situation, but we kept plugging along.  Still trying to make it better.  Things began to pick back up at work for me.  More hours meant more money coming in.  Better right?  That also meant more time away from my family.
My previous job was as a wildland firefighter so I was very used to spending long periods of time away from them.  Not ideal, but we do what we do.  When I was finished with fire, I vowed to make my family a much higher priority in my life.  I missed many birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and the like.  I barely made it to the hospital for my daughters birth.  No more putting other things before my family.  This is where my QA job was taking me.  The work load got to the point where we needed someone to work the night shift.  Guess who?  My supervisor came to me with a request to take the night shift.  We had discussed my previous 10 years of work experience which kept me from them.  I told my supervisor that I could not work the night shift and see my wife and children.  Weekends is not the time for full time fathers.  I was given an ultimatum, work the nights or you are out.  I chose my family.  They fired me two weeks later, on a Monday no less.  When the reality of this sunk in, Tres (my wife) started to see the value of a year on the road, taking the time for our family that we had never taken before.  She became a fan of some change.

The adventure was born.