For the past four years my husband, Drew, and I have been traveling the world by van. It all started in 2011, after we both graduated from the University of Florida, where we met, and drove straight across the country to the Land of Dreams Los Angeles only to find ourselves, three years later, yearning for something that extended well beyond the reach of our desks.

Drew had been working to start an online business selling refurbished luxury watches when he realized that the future he was creating did not align with his truest values. Similarly, I was fed up with feeling overworked, undervalued and lost in the stressful mix of night shifts and desk-sitting monotony that clouded my daily existence as the head of intake, aftercare and admissions at an eating disorder recovery center.

We both knew there had to be more to this life than what society had taught us to pursue. We felt stuck in an endless cycle of living for our weekends and it just didnt feel like enough not enough freedom, not enough purpose, not enough creativity or joy. We wondered why we couldnt just be grateful for the lives we were living, but we felt numbed out dead to the aliveness that we knew existed somewhere deep within us and so we set out to find it.