It Ain't Over (11 page)

Near Rock Springs, Wyoming, they drove into a hailstorm so severe that even the truckers were pulling over.

When Doreen and Tim got to their first overnight truck stop, it was so full they had to drive around in the rain to find another place to park. When at last they settled in to sleep—in the parking lot of a Wyoming community college—they discovered that one of their cats had been so freaked out by the storm she’d peed on their mattress.

Things could only get better.

But they didn’t. As they were about to leave a gas station in Reno a few days later, the door lock—the same one that had let the door fly open on the highway—got stuck. Doreen and Tim were left standing outside the bus in 100-degree heat; their poodle and two cats were locked inside with no air-conditioning.

While waiting for the locksmith to get there, Doreen had a meltdown.

“I felt stuck,” she says. “We had already rented out our house for the whole year and there was no turning back.” She was so miserable, Tim actually offered to turn around, go home, and live in a rental until they could get their house back. But Doreen agreed to give it some time. “I knew it was very important to him,” she says.

Besides, she
was
looking forward to escaping the winter cold—and, as the saying goes, they had places to go and people to see.

After they got back from their test run, they put their plan into motion. Musts on their itinerary: Mount Rushmore in South Dakota; the Mall of America in Minneapolis (“my Mecca,” says Doreen); and then they’d “meander East for a while,” just in time to chase the fall colors down the coast.

“Our lives had been so planned out that we really wanted to wing it as much as possible,” Doreen says.

So off they went. It didn’t take Doreen long to fall in love with the carefree lifestyle. “Two months in,” she says, “we were in New Hampshire about to drive up Mount Washington. It was a gorgeous New England fall day in the
middle of the week. I remember thinking,
I wouldn’t have this day if I were still living in Colorado and going to the hospital. What a gift this is.
”

During their year on the road, they traveled more than 20,000 miles to 47 states, including Alaska (where, it turned out, Doreen didn’t get much work done since their satellite Internet and cell phones couldn’t get reception).

If they liked a place, they stayed longer; if they felt like moving on, they did.

On Amelia Island, Florida, they walked four miles on an almost empty beach, watching dolphins frolicking offshore. In San Francisco, they played tourist, grabbing lunch in Chinatown and dessert at Ghirardelli Square.

“After 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, 4 years of residency, then 15 years of private practice—all in their predictable order, with their predictable schedules—I didn’t realize how much I needed to take a leap into the unknown,” Doreen says. “My life had become routine. I started to realize that perhaps ‘settled down’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Not that life on the road was always smooth. In Virginia, faulty wiring caused flames to shoot out of the bus roof. In Arizona, they encountered an armed robber at a burrito joint. In California, they accidentally stumbled into a nudist RV park. “All the new experiences, even the bad ones, challenged me in a way I never would have imagined,” she says. “They brought a certain aliveness back that I hadn’t even realized was missing.”

And Doreen felt more connected to Tim than ever before. “Getting through all the disasters boosted my confidence in us as a team,” she says. “It gave me the feeling we could handle anything.” Back home in Colorado, they would plop down in front of the TV after work to eat dinner. On the bus, they grocery shopped together, flirting in the aisles, and listened to music while Tim cooked.

“We had always had a good relationship, so I was surprised at how much closer we grew,” she says.

The travels also gave Doreen time to look within herself, “instead of focusing on external things, like maintaining a dream house or having a shoe collection worthy of Imelda Marcos,” she says. “It made me realize that collecting experiences is more important than collecting stuff.”

Doreen even started a blog chronicling their adventures, which she turned into a personal memoir:
Queen of the Road: The True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, a Husband and a Bus with a Will of Its Own.

When the year was up and they returned to their house and to reality, Tim and Doreen couldn’t bring themselves to sell the bus. So even as they resumed their jobs, they rearranged their schedules so they could take winters off and hit the road to warmer climates.

“But every time we returned home, we missed life on the bus,” she says. So in 2012, they went all the way: They sold their house and most of their possessions, and the day before Doreen’s fifty-third birthday, they embarked on a permanent road trip. They work just enough at their telecommuting jobs to support their scaled-down “explorer’s life.”

“When fellow travelers ask us where we’re from, we always answer nowhere—and everywhere. Not a day has gone by that we don’t look at each other and marvel at how lucky we are to be living this new life. Literally and figuratively, it has taken us places I’ve never been. When your surroundings are downsized, your horizons are endless.”

Lynn Douglas, 52

Tahoe City, California

L
ynn Douglas walked into her boss’s office and, exhibiting the same strength and conviction that had catapulted her up the ladder during her 17-year career at the company, abruptly quit.

“It was the first time I’d ever done something so impulsive.”

Lynn’s career had been her life. She was so dedicated to her job, she’d made a conscious decision not to get married or have kids. And through the nineties, that single-minded devotion to career paid off: She thrived on the challenge of working on contracts with booming Silicon Valley high-tech companies.

“It was like solving a puzzle,” she says. “And because I was a broker, I was the middleman, talking to both the client and the company, so there was this wonderful personal interaction.” To top it off, her coworkers were young and fun—and she was pulling in six figures. What was not to like?

But in 1999, her firm was swallowed up by a bigger company, Marsh & McLennan. The result: more bureaucracy, more managerial duties, and less
time for personal attention to her customers. “I didn’t feel like I could make a difference anymore in this big pond,” she says, “so I lost the drive.”

To get it back, Lynn decided in early 2001 to take a three-month vacation to reinvigorate her spirits. And what better place than a ski cabin near Lake Tahoe? She’d learned how to ski at age five, taken childhood ski trips to Yosemite with her family every Christmas and Easter, and skied through high school and college. Then life—in the form of her first real insurance job—intervened. Working late into the evenings and many weekends for more than a decade, she’d had no time for the slopes.

But when she was 35 and her friend Danna offered her a spot in a cabin at Squaw Valley, “I immediately took to skiing again,” she says. She’d go bell to bell—from the moment the lifts opened to the last chair of the day. “I loved the adrenaline rush,” she says, “the freedom from unleashing all the pent-up energy and frustrations of a desk job.” She’d fly down the mountain runs, feeling confident and strong. “I had defined myself by my job titles and responsibilities,” she says. “Now I was liberating myself from them.”

Driving up Squaw Valley Road on Friday evenings, Lynn would often roll down her window to let the absolute stillness surround her. “It’s what you
don’t
hear that is remarkable,” she says. “I could feel the serenity.”

It was that peacefulness she was after during her work break in January 2001. Lynn and a girlfriend skied and skied. She was happy, but torn. Though she wanted this life in Tahoe, she told herself, “You can’t have it. Don’t get attached. You have to go back to work.”

And she did go back to her life in San Francisco and her job at Marsh that April, recharged and ready to bury herself over the next six months in a big project: the company’s internal audit.

Two women from Marsh’s New York audit department arrived in San Francisco on September 10, 2001. The next day, driving in to work and
anxious to hear the audit results, Lynn turned on the radio to breaking news: Two airplanes had just crashed into the World Trade Center. It was so shocking that Lynn didn’t believe it at first.

But what startled her more was her reaction as she arrived at her eerily quiet office and everyone was being told to go home.

“I thought, ‘How is this going to affect all the work I put into this audit?’ ” Lynn says. “I mean, really: ‘How is this going to affect
me
?’ ”

When the office reopened the next day, Lynn found out that all 300 Marsh employees on floors 93 through 100 of the Trade Center’s North Tower had been killed. Lynn had briefly met only a few of the victims, but as the announcements came over her email, listing name after name of lost peers, “that’s when the wave of tears came,” she says. She realized how selfish she had been, how insignificant she, and the work she had done for the audit, truly were. “That was a turning point,” she says. “I knew I needed to change.”

Lynn looked hard at her own life. The last six months, pouring all of her time and energy into prepping for this audit, why did it matter?

Did she love what she was doing? No. Was it important to her? No. Was she happy? No.

Lynn couldn’t quiet the noise in her head.

So three months later, when her boss called her into his office to ask a routine question, she didn’t even sit down before blurting out, “I can’t work here any longer.” He didn’t act surprised, nor did he try to convince her to stay. Meanwhile, running through her mind was:
How could I have done this?
She didn’t have another job lined up. What exactly was she going to do next?

But over the next two weeks, as she finished up projects and cleaned out her desk, she felt her body unclench. “I knew I had made the right decision,” she says.

Lynn had saved enough money that she didn’t have to work again right
away, so she headed back up to Tahoe. Three months into her new life, she met a guy on the chairlift named Dave. Fresh off a divorce, he had also left an unfulfilling career to take time off and refocus on his future.

“He had integrity, the kind that comes from really caring about more than just himself,” she says. “I wanted to be around that type of person; I wanted to learn from him.” And it got even better: He was an avid cook, and when she opened his freezer, she found containers filled with single servings of food he had put away for the week. “He was comfortable being on his own, and I admired that about him,” she says. “I knew he was a keeper.” Three dates later, she moved in with him.

Just who
was
this unpredictable woman in the 40-year-old body? Lynn didn’t know, but she sure liked her. “Instead of waking up every day with a feeling of dread, I woke up and thought, ‘I can’t wait to start my day,’ ” she says. “All of a sudden I’d become this other person, and I’d never been happier.”