We’re finally doing it! Jen got her first travel nurse assignment and it’s in Palo Alto, California. We’ll be packing up the Jeep and leaving in a few short weeks.

This is something we’ve been wanting to do for years. Before we got married, the plan was to live a year in our Kentwood apartment and then start bouncing around the country on travel nurse assignments. As fate would have it, the economy tanked right at the same time as we got married and all the travel nurse gigs dried up.

We instead bought a house over in Hudsonville, all the while keeping one eye on website listings for travel nurses. They slowly started popping up over time, and after a few failed attempts, we kind of gave up looking for a while. That is, until we went out to San Diego with my brother Scott and his wife Betsy for a few days in the spring.

That short little trip out west awoke that desire to travel again, and we started looking for real this time, though we kept it quiet. We had cried wolf on prior occasions about how this time, we were serious about traveling, and didn’t want to tell anyone unless it actually worked out.

And it did! We were at a Thai cooking class one night and Jen got a call from a hospital in Palo Alto and they did a phone interview right on the spot. The manager sounded positive and called Jen’s recruiter the next day to sign her up.

It still doesn’t seem real. Neither of us has ever lived in another state. The closest I ever got was a few months being a camp counselor a few counties away. This is going to be a new adventure for us both. We’ve got a few weeks left to tie up loose ends around here and then we’re off. We can’t wait!