2015 Roadtrip: A Preview
Jennifer and I have been doing roadtrips with a focus on self betterment for a while now. (Check out roadtrips from 2013 and 2014). We’ve gotten pretty good at getting the most out of a short span of time, probably because we are neurotic planners and hell-bent on efficiency.
We had gotten so good, in fact, that we thought ourselves educated enough to teach a workshop on coming up with your own roadtrip plan. We had worksheets, cookies and coffee, everything. We charged a fee to help pay for our 2015 summer roadtrip, which our friends were so kind and trusting to offer us. The irony of this being, most people wanted to know how we made them cost-effective. The one thing we did not make a good enough effort to log and synthesize information on. (Already room for improvement).
By the spring of 2015 we already had a 4-week spread out plan of few-day trips up to Santa Barbara where we would be tackling one big accomplishment: paragliding certification.
We made it through a pretty beautiful first week:
That said, if you saw our youtube video from Shine Storytelling we posted recently… you know how the rest of the trip worked out…
Another version of this video posted by Shine cane be found here.
What we have yet to do is write about the amended roadtrip we ended up doing to make up for this curve ball of a summer.
We are going to spend our next few blog posts writing about our equally awesome mini-roadtrip make-up session we threw together to make the most of our summer, for a few reasons:
- First, to prove that we can find the silver lining in just about anything.
- To honor the money and interest our friends put into our first professional attempt to share this process with those we care about.
- To document new things we’ve learned, things we’ve seen and curriculum we have used to continually challenge ourselves.
We hope you can get something our of our experience and build up the courage to take a self-betterment roadtrip of your own!
Before we get into a brief overview of round 2, I’d like to mention something now so we can breeze by it in upcoming pieces. I have developed some unexplained health problem that basically means I can’t process, digest or expel food without extreme pain. I go from one end of that spectrum to the other, imagine whatever you want with that information, but basically, doing anything can be either perfectly find with some mild pain, or debilitating and I basically have to lie down and not get up for hours or days at a time. Just to give an example. On round one, Jennifer found this awesome Quartz bowl Sound bath type session in these man made salt caves in Santa Barbara. We had done something similar at the Integratron in our last roadtrip, so we were both stoked.
I can’t be sure of what exactly happened, because it’s never happened before. But put simply, these quartz bowls are intended to resonate with all your different energy centers, chakras or whatever you’d like to call them. So, instead of this being a relaxing experience like it was for everyone else, I spent the whole hour trying not to scream and vomit. The sound seemed to be making my insides thrash so hard inside me I thought I was going to explode.
We walked to dinner right after and I almost fell over on the way, almost vomited in the restroom of the restaurant and eventually cried through most of the meal into my dinner plate because it hurt so bad. Our waitress thought it was because I couldn’t handle Indian spices and I kept trying to explain that it wasn’t the food, but I couldn’t really speak. I felt so bad. The waitress felt guilty for the food, Jennifer felt guilty for having planned an activity that in any other case would have been awesome, and I felt guilty for making what should have been nothing but fun into a miserable experience.
After this, Jennifer made amendments to our plan to make sure I knew I could walk out of anything at any time and would keep this in mind when planning our round two. In these pieces, I don’t usually describe these less glamorous perspectives, especially because I am biased by the amount of awesome. But in the theme of self-betterment and making changes to accommodate the unexpected, I want to make clear that we have had to make a lot of changes this year for each other’s bodies. Something I think we would have been much less equipped to handle well back in 2013.
MOVING ON.
Our amended trip was just under five days (our last being a half day).
We decided that we would tackle solely the texts that we intended to read during round one of our roadtrip. We would reroute to see as many of the central California cities that we could, cities we planned to see during round one and also consolidate our time (as some one of us had work and the other was looking for work) including Ojai, Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Ventura and, of course, more Santa Barbara.
The texts we used for this trip include:
- Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges
- When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
- Graduates in Wonderland by Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale (We would get through the first 60 pages on our last day, and read the rest as a kind of book club after I moved to SF and Jennifer stayed in SoCal). Also, for bff’s you should really read this book and check out their website.
Stay tuned for our Round 2 Roadtrip daily posts.
~Vivi
Web Content Intern, Generation Hopeful