Deciding to Sell Everything and Travel the Country

My mom said, “What if you were nomads?” We had been living in Oxford, MS for the past two years — through the COVID-19 pandemic. We laughed about it a bit and didn’t think much of it until we were driving back home from our visit. “What if we were nomads?”, I asked Parker. He suggested we AirBnb somewhere different each month.

Our lease was ending in August, Parker had just graduated, I was working remotely, and we had already been trying to decide between a few cities to move to. Choosing a new city to live in seemed daunting, so why not try out a few of them like a charcuterie board? We knew we wanted to see new places, try new things, and meet new people. It was perfect.

One night we sat down at the coffee table and each wrote down a list of the places we most wanted to visit. We cut out the pieces of paper so each city had its own little slip. Then we set up a little bracket for ourselves and voted on which ones we wanted to live in / visit the most. After a few rounds of this, we narrowed our lists down from around 30 cities to about 10 or so.

Our first two cities? Washington D.C and Toronto! From there we’ll work our way across the continent from east to west by car.

That also meant we needed to sell just about everything we had that wouldn’t fit in one car. And we had to sell our other car. Thus began our crazy two week garage / moving sale extravaganza! We bought a tiny storage unit for some of our sentimental and too-expensive-to-replace belongings, and the rest we posted on Facebook Marketplace (would not recommend — people act like you owe them something?), or set out in the driveway.

We were lucky to have a few God-sent neighbors come by and help load up furniture and haul away some things for donations. One gentleman, Mr. Searcy, stopped by out of the blue and, without hesitation or second thought, helped us load an entire queen-size bed into the back of a family’s pickup truck. Being in Mississippi at the end of July, it was unfathomably hot and sweaty work. Mr. Searcy stayed for the rest of the afternoon and helped us move our dining room table, a couch, and a loveseat. We couldn’t have done it without him.

The next day, a few women from a nearby church came by to take some donations. Their church had been burned down a few weeks earlier and they were trying to raise funds to rebuild it, along with a child care center. We loaded up the last of our unpacked possessions with them.

By the end of that day we had the car packed and the house was empty. It’s a such a strange feeling standing in a house you lived in — where so much life had happened — and seeing it completely empty. Our friends Allison and Will waved us off, gave us the biggest hugs, and took a few photos.

And that was it. We waved goodbye to Oxford and hit the road to Washington DC and an exciting new chapter in our lives.