The Big Announcement

During my pregnancy with Otto, Mike and I talked alot about our future. Future dreams, plans, and ideas. When we married 11 years ago a mentor of ours encouraged us to sit down and write out a family plan. A plan of action for our lives. Things that were not just flimsy dreams but real, true ideas and plans for our lives that were in a way non-negotiable.
The idea of this is that no matter where in life we are, how many years we are married, or the direction life seems to be going, we can always refer back to this family plan and have some sort of reminder of the dreams and hopes we had (have) for our lives together.
This has worked amazingly for us. We have had quite a few twists and turns during our married life but each time we can always come back to what we value as a couple and what matters most.
One of those things we wrote down in our family plan was to always find adventure together. We love to travel (as I have mentioned before) and part of the spark and romance in our marriage has always been to stay out of the rut of everyday life. Yes, Mike still heads off to work each day and we live a fairly typical American life. But we always try to stay out of a rut. We try hard to keep things adventurous, fun, and somewhat unpredictable.
As we started talking through future plans a few months back a re-occurring theme continued to rise to the surface....travel.
After many late night brainstorming sessions we were inspired to do this:




Backseat Traveler is a new blog we are launching this week. Its been and continues to be a work-in-progress but we are excited about it and excited to see what adventures lie ahead.
We have several goals for this blog. Of course we are looking forward to plenty of family fun, chronicling the adventures we go on and sharing those with others. But on a deeper level we are hoping to inspire families to spend weekends together. For dads to put down the golf clubs a couple of Saturdays a month, for moms to forgo the mall and jump in the car with the family to make wonderful memories together.

The site has (and will continue filling out with content) ideas for free trips, cheap trips, and splurges. There is also a link for "share your experience" in which readers can share their own outings and we'll post them to the blog.

So there it is~ our newest family adventure. We're excited to see where these adventures take us!

Please let me know what you think and if you have any thoughts or suggestions. And pass it along to friends and family!