How it all began.

It all really began back in 2020.

My daughter was set to graduate high school in June and I was still at a little shoe company in Beaverton, Oregon, where I’d been since 2003. After 10 years there, employees get a five‑week sabbatical, and then another one every five years. With my second sabbatical on deck, I’d planned an epic five‑week trip with my wife and daughter for the summer of 2020: Amsterdam, Singapore, Thailand, and Japan. I was finally going to circumnavigate the globe – still a big goal of mine.

Then COVID came out of nowhere in March 2020 and everything fell apart.

Some close friends were planning a wedding in Puerto Escondido, Mexico in December 2020 and we had every intention of going. The wedding was ultimately postponed, but we decided to take the trip anyway. We pivoted our sabbatical plans into a five‑week adventure through a handful of destinations in Mexico.

Read the full story of our five‑week trip to Mexico here.

When we finally came back home to Oregon after that long trip, it was the middle of a cold, rainy winter. We were still deep in the pandemic and, honestly, it sucked – lockdowns, quarantines, masks, and all that shite. We figured if we were going to quarantine and social distance, we might as well do it on a beach in Mexico for a month and see how it felt.

Read the full story of our one‑month trip to San Pancho, Mexico here.

After that month in San Pancho, we were hooked and ready for more. So we planned a big road trip from our home in Oregon all the way down to the southern tip of Baja California, and back.

Read the full story of our Baja road trip here.

It was during our second stay in Todos Santos that Traci came up with the brilliant idea that changed everything: rent out our home in Oregon, fully furnished, so we could travel for months at a time. That way we’d have income to cover the mortgage and utilities, and the peace of mind that comes with having tenants looking after the place.

Of course, that meant a ton of prep. We needed to get the house ready to rent, which started with a massive purge. We went through every closet, every drawer, every cabinet, every storage space, and got ruthless. We sold the things that still had good value, and donated or gave away the rest. We also had to figure out where to stash our personal stuff while renters were in the house.

In the end, we decided to lock a couple of kitchen cabinets, the closet under the stairs, our walk‑in closet off the primary bedroom, and an entire bonus room. We also used the overhead storage in the garage for anything else we wanted to keep.

Once the house was ready, we listed it on furnishedfinder.com and Zillow. Before long, we had renters lined up from mid‑March 2022 through the end of June 2022.

And that’s when our real adventures began.