The Dainings are Going on a Crazy Road Trip to North Eastern Canada!

We've gone a bit crazier than normal this summer and decided to do a SEVEN week trip this year instead of our normal three week trip.

Plus, we're doing half of the trip by camping in the back of our vehicle (and the other half of the time in airbnbs). Eep. 

The goal is to slowly travel up the Appalachian Mountains into Nova Scotia before heading west to Michigan for some time with family. 

Google maps won't let me show you our entire trip for some reason (gotta love random "updates") so I put the map of our journey into two map images below. (Please note: in typical 'us' fashion, we're avoiding almost every single city...Philadelphia and Boston were tempting but sounded too stressful to include. We really hate cities....)

 Why This Trip? Why Seven Weeks?

There are a few reasons for doing this trip and also for the length.

1. Our darling precious pup Achilles passed away last fall, and this is the first (and probably only) time in our life we have no dog tying us to our location for long periods of time. We figure that we should take advantage of not having a lot of responsibilities (we also recently moved and don't have much of a homestead situation set up yet either) by doing a longer trip.

2. We wanted to go back to Europe for seven weeks but plane tickets are ridiculously expensive this year. We're hoping they go down in price in future years, but we just couldn't justify that cost this time around.

3. Nova Scotia aka 'NEW SCOTLAND' is named that because it's similar to Scotland in geography and weather. Well, we flippin' loved Scotland so this sounded like a cheaper alternative to flying across the pond.

4. It's been a bucket list item for me since I was a child to see Prince Edward Island (aka Anne of Green Gables!!!). This seemed like a fun time to include that into our adventure.

5. We've been wanting to see both coasts of Canada for a long time now. We're headed to the west coast of Canada next summer so it sounded like a great idea to see this coast first.

6. For my 40th birthday, I friggin wanted to eat lobster in Maine....so we're doing that. A lot. 

7. We've been curious about camping in the back of the vehicle for a long time now. We've done a few weekend trips and enjoyed it and now we're curious what it will be like to adventure like this for longer periods of time. If we like it enough, maybe this will just be what we do every summer...live like nomads in the back of our car and soak up adventures left and right. 

--> I'm sure there will be plenty of moments of discomfort on this camping trip, but we've already talked about how we won't snap at each other (even if we don't sleep well) and we'll laugh it off instead of letting it get us down. It's all about attitude and we're going to try our hardest to make it fun.

But what about work?

We nerded out and got Starlink so that we can work from our campground sites every day. Both Paul and I are working this summer. I took two weeks of time off scattered in those seven weeks, but for the most part, we plan on working every morning and every evening and adventuring in between. 

Anyway, that's the plan for the next seven weeks of our life! Fingers crossed we get good weather and safe driving!

We won't update this travel blog every day but we're going to try to post every few days. Stay tuned!