<![CDATA[LESTAT ESCAPES

The Feeling

We worked so hard to build this life together.

Two college graduates. Two busy careers. Somewhere in between, we still found time for the “extras” — Jon’s DJ company, my board seat, networking events, side projects, packed calendars.

On paper, everything looked right.
Two solid careers | Nice cars | Comfortable home | Dependable income

We had built the kind of life we thought we were supposed to want.
But slowly, without even realizing it, we became disconnected from ourselves.
We were exhausted. Living for the weekends. Moving through life on autopilot. Calendars so packed there was no room left to recharge.
And the scariest part?
From the outside, everything still looked fine.

The Quiet Realization

At first, it just felt like an itch.

Maybe we needed a change of scenery. Maybe we just needed to move. After 17 years in one place, we thought maybe we had simply outgrown our city.

But once we started paying attention, we realized it was deeper than that. The things that truly lit us up were no longer promotions, packed schedules, or constantly chasing the next thing.
It was:
Nature | Adventure | Slow mornings | Time with our dogs

We started tuning in to the moments where we actually felt like ourselves again. And slowly, a difficult truth began to surface:

The life we had built no longer felt aligned with who we were becoming.

The Shift

Nothing changed overnight.

At first, we thought the answer was the Pacific Northwest. Portland maybe. A fresh start. New jobs. New apartment. New scenery.
But every time we searched for jobs or toured places online, we both felt the same unsettling feeling: “This isn’t it.”

So, we kept going through the motions of our old life while quietly carrying this tiny flame inside us — this growing feeling that we were meant for something different.

Then, at the end of 2023, the universe gave us the push we needed. I was laid off. And strangely enough… it felt less like an ending and more like an opening.

The severance gave us something we hadn’t had in years:
Time. Time to pause. Time to think. Time to ask ourselves what we actually wanted our lives to look like.

A New Beginning

That’s when everything started to shift. We realized we didn’t just want a different city—we wanted a different way of living. One rooted in freedom, adventure, nature, and presence.

Then one day I said: What if we stopped trying to solve everything at once? What if I started my own business? What if we bought an RV and traveled the country looking for where we truly belonged?
For the first time in a long time, the idea felt right.

By April, we had moved to Sacramento, sold nearly everything we owned, paid off debt, and rebuilt our lives from the ground up. That September, we bought our RV. By the following May, we were finally ready to hit the road.

We still had no idea exactly what we were doing.
But for the first time in years, we felt alive again.

→ Next: The conversations that changed everything.

]]>