Adventures of an Introvert

Arches National Park, Utah

There's no doubt about it; I'm an introvert. In hindsight, that was the single largest factor in my decision to leave my job. I was a programmer by trade (a trained mechanical engineer) who eventually found himself presenting to large groups, organizing meetings, leading teams, managing customer accounts, helping with sales, running user-group meetings and--on rare occasions--sitting down to quietly write some code (or maybe a blog post). There was a mismatch between my core personality and my daily routines. Of course, I didn't realize this at my moment of resignation. I just knew I was constantly feeling overwhelmed while approaching the point of burn-out. It took distance, a single-minded hands-on project, and my timely consumption of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking to piece this all together.

The Idea

It was over a year ago that I first proposed this crazy idea to my wife: let's buy a camper and take a summer-long road trip! I thought she might sigh before proposing an obvious flaw in my plan, a flaw I could not see through the ambition-tinted lenses of the self-improvement life goggles I had been wearing for a (probably obnoxiously) long time.
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...But she didn't. Instead, we started scheming. How could we afford it? What type of rig would we feel comfortable driving coast to coast? What would we do with the cats, chickens, dog, fish?

It turned out that the answers to most of these questions were simple--and the two we were most concerned about ended up not being problems at all. With full food and water bowls (thanks, M&D!), the cats were quite happy to lounge in the back yard awaiting our return. The chickens, who probably did less lounging, also thrived with little human intervention.

The Journey

America, the viewable.

A photo posted by Ethan Stern (@ethandstern) on Sep 1, 2016 at 7:39am PDT

It's just amazing how much a clear head and a forgotten calendar can do to spark ideas and to clarify priorities. Most days I wasn't too sure the day of the week and both mileage and elevation were usually more relevant than time. When necessary, I measured time only in relative terms: hours or minutes to our next turn or destination.

Our trip was an absolute blast, jam-packed with national park excursions, friend and family visits, and seemingly endless drives up mountains and across vast spaces.

During an election cycle filled with an abnormally large amount of bigotry and hostile quasi-religious fervor, it was refreshing to take a firsthand coast-to-coast inventory of the land we call home.