The Challenge

It all started this summer while I was sitting in church one Sunday morning. The senior pastor at church was on a sabbatical for the summer so the other pastors in the church were taking turns speaking on the topic of dreams. My friend and the youth pastor at the church, Mandy, preached a sermon titled, "Where is the Dreamer in You?"

She told a story of her dream to write a novel so she decided to participate in National Novel Writing month. It's November if you're wanting to participate. She talked about how accomplished she felt even though it's a story that will never be published. She had written a novel. As I sat there and listened to her speak and watched the excitement she felt talking about what she did, something stirred within me. I was finally able to articulate my dream. It's a dream that I had been vaguely tossing around in my head for a while, but was never quite able to put a label on.

I want to travel to all fifty states.

Dreams have been a tough subject for me ever since college when I decided to let go of a dream I'd had since I was seven years old. Ever since I gave up pursuing being a teacher, I partly felt like a failure and partly felt a lot of pressure to find my purpose in life. Since then though I've learned that no person has one single great purpose in life besides my religious views to love God and love people.

So I set off on my quest. I listed out the states and crossed off the ones I've been to for something besides passing through. My total was a sad and pathetic thirteen. One of my bosses told me about a special Southwest was running so I looked at my calendar and booked three trips. This blog will be the stories of my travels. I'm not traveling to new places all the time so that will give me time to go back and retrace the steps that got me to where I'm at. Come along for the ride - planes, trains, and automobiles are all included.