We embark on a road trip to New York for Thanksgiving to see my sister Lisa and brother-in-law Dan plus oh-so-great nieces and nephews Sophie, Ben and Clara with the added benefit of our brother Danny coming from Aspen to celebrate our Dad's 80th birthday.

From the second we get in the car, we once again feel what we felt on our summer road trip. The feeling of joy at being truly together as a family and able to make decisions together about what we want to do and experience without the weight of feeling like we can't becasue of time constraints, obligations and confliciting schedules.

This is also the exact moment I remember another thing I stored in a messy, random pile of ideas in my brain that not so coincidentally resembles the messy, random piles of mail and papers that occupy every available horizontal surface in my home. Anyway, the idea that I remembered was brought to my attention by my friend Robin who said she saw a family on tv that quit their jobs, sold their homes, and began homeschooling their kids while they traveled around the country in an RV indefinitely.

I casually let the idea out as we are driving and partly becasue he was so happy it didn't involve leaving the country, and partly because we had 11 more hours of driving ahead of us, Mike let the idea live for a few beautiful, albeit brief, moments.

I tried only to bring it up once every hour, lest I appeared to eager. With every objection, I threw out a 'what if' or 'why not'? Heck, I even threw in a few objections of my own and saw Mike actually solving for them. Even though I hate math, because it always seems to be the reason ideas get killed, I knew I would need math on my side to give the idea a fighting chance.

11 hours later, we had a 42 line item list of life / household expenditures vs. a equally hearty line item list of savings we would realize by getting on the road in an RV.

I felt secure that the possibility, however slim, was there.