How we came to this idea

This is stepping back a little from our first post to recall, roughly, how we came up with these plans. I should first point out that our plans were spurred on by the following four books:

• The Bible (Mark 16:15, Luke 9:23-24, Mark 8:36, Matthew 25:31-46)
• Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne
• One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-The-World Journey with Our Children by David Cohen
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Our plans have changed a lot over the last few months as we wrestled with what we wanted to do to mix things up a little. Originally I had the idea of taking some time for extended travel. It didn’t take much research to realize that this was an expensive proposition. The kids don’t get a discount for their airline tickets, and eat just about as much as us. Plus, given that our youngest can’t handle her own luggage, and the other can only handle it for short periods we didn’t think it would be easy to get around.

This slowly evolved into less travel and more staying in one place until we realized that the most sense might be to just stay in one place for the entire time. As we began to ask what we wanted to get out of this trip (See our post on Why?) this also made a lot more sense. Optimistically, we thought that if we could find somewhere relatively inexpensive to live, if we could rent out our house, if we could get plane tickets for cheap, and if I could find a little bit of contract work to do while traveling we could go for as much as three months or even longer.

The Dominican Republic was one of our final three choices for location because it is Spanish speaking, is relatively safe, is fairly inexpensive to travel to, and has reasonable infrastructure (primarily so I could get Internet access for some contract work). What really won us over is it’s proximity to Haiti which we already have some connections to, and to where some good friends of ours have just moved.

Now we just had to figure out where to go.