After decompressing in Mendoza, Argentina, for three weeks, it’s time for our big trip. For the third time in a year (the fourth time for Eric), we are returning to the United States to visit. The reason for this visit is Overland Expo West! If all goes according to plan, we’ll be at Expo West every even-numbered year to share our drive around the world and the overlanding knowledge we’ve earned.
In this video, we share our short flight to Santiago and three days in Chile’s capital city. Then we take a red eye flight from Santiago to Denver, but we travel in style! Several years ago, we switched to a solid rewards credit card and we’ve expanded our travel hacking endeavors since then. After almost three years, we saved enough points to travel first class. For this eight-and-a-half-hour flight, we got to use Aeromexico’s lay-flat beds in the 787 Dreamliner.
But before I say too much, watch now to see the ins-and-outs of flying to the other side of the world:
Why so many trips to the U.S.?
Why the heck have we been back to the states so many times in one year? For those who are curious, I’ll explain the plan…and how the plan went off the rails.
The very general plan when we left in 2021 was that we’d return to the states every 1.5-2 years. We knew we had to be back for Christmas 2023 because my side of the family spends every odd-numbered Christmas together. So we expected that would be our first time back.
Visit #1
But as the calendar turned to 2023, it had been nearly a year-and-a-half since we’d seen Eric’s mom, Lety. We felt we needed to make an extra trip to see her and it couldn’t wait until the planned Christmas trip. So we came back to the U.S. for the first time in April 2023. We saw the rest of our family and presented at Overland Expo West 2023, since the timing worked out.
Visit #2
At the end of July 2023, we received word that Eric’s mom was declining quickly. He took the next plane out of Cuenca, Ecuador, but he didn’t arrive in time. We were grateful we’d made the extra trip earlier in the year. Eric stayed in Seattle for about 10 days, working through Lety’s affairs.
Visit #3
All three of us headed back to the United States in October 2023. This holiday trip was the one we’d planned all along. But we arrived earlier to hold a memorial service for Lety in Seattle. My grandpa passed away the day after Lety’s memorial, so Caspian and I took a last-minute flight to Toronto for his memorial. We spent the next couple of months seeing family and friends, and even visiting Disney World (a happy place for our family).
Visit #4
By this time, we’d adjusted the original plan. We loosely decided to come back for odd-numbered Christmases (2025, 2027, etc.) and even-numbered Overland Expo Wests (2024, 2026, etc.).
If I’m being honest, I didn’t want to make this 2024 trip. Between flights and daily living expenses, coming back to the U.S. is expensive. And it’s a psychological somersault to transition between our “normal” life in South America, to life in the states, then back to Dauntless. And we were just here at the beginning of January 2024. It felt like we’d barely settled back into South America when we had to get ready to leave again.
I don’t want to feel this way about coming back. There is a lot to love about seeing family and friends, plus having the ease and familiarity of the U.S. I need to remember this feeling isn’t happening in a vacuum. We didn’t plan to visit so many times in one year, and we don’t plan to moving forward. We have suffered two losses in the past year, so that has overshadowed our trips.
I know these details don’t matter to most people. But for anyone who has wondered why we’ve been coming and going so often, this is the explanation. When we leave the states again in July 2024, we don’t plan to return for another visit until Christmas 2025.
What’s new with Hourless Life?
This latest video is almost real-time. We finished our time with my brother’s family in Denver and started south towards Overland Expo West. We stopped in Moab for Mother’s Day weekend, which was a joy. The weather was sublime–truly the best time of year to visit.
From there, we met up with friends to camp in the national forest outside Flagstaff. As this video publishes, we’re finishing up at Overland Expo and getting ready for the next leg of our U.S. visit.
Thanks for joining us on this wild adventure.
-B
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