As I mentioned in my last post, Mr. FGK & I recently left Korea to move to Singapore. With a month in between jobs & the promise of two one way tickets at the end of our Korean contracts, we had endless options. However, we decided that all we really wanted to do was visit the motherland, namely our families. After trying to book flights back to the deep south, where we’re from, we ran into a dilemma. We could either wait a week longer to fly out & in turn lose a week of time at home, or take a really horrible, really expensive flight with really long layovers.

I mentioned this to some of my friends from California to which they replied, “Too bad you’re not going to … (where ever on the West Coast). You’d get a much cheaper & shorter flight.” A light bulb went off!

Mr. FGK & I have talked for years about how much we’d like to rent a car & drive across America. We’ve daydreamed about Big Sur, the Grand Canyon, redwoods & deserts. And after years spent living as expats in Korea, we’d worked & saved enough to make this happen. When would a better opportunity present itself? Also, after years spent as foreigners without a car in Korea, we really missed the feeling of driving. So we booked flights from Incheon to Portland & rented a car.

We did this with about 2 weeks notice. As you can imagine, mid-move, saying goodbye to our lives in one country & making arrangements to move to another, very little planning got done in those two weeks. We touched down in America with nothing more than arrangements made for a rental car & two nights in a hotel.

That is the way to travel. We rarely plan when booking a trip. Usually, if we see a decent flight that happens to fall in line with our days off work, we book it first & plan lightly later. Or when we’re feeling really confident & bold, arrive first & make tentative plans later.  You never know what you will enjoy the most once you’re in a new place unless you let yourself experience it first. In this case, we took the trip day by day. We never booked a hotel or even decided where to go more than 24 hours in advance. We were only driving for 16 days, but it felt like months.  And it was, hands down, the time of my life. Just me, my man & the open road.