You don't need the perfect moment.
We didn't set out to build a travel company. We built the case for not waiting. We each learned it the hard way, from opposite directions.
The trip I almost didn't take.
My husband and I talked about Italy for ten years. Ten. We finally booked it in 2017, with a go date of April 2019, because apparently we needed two full years of runway to feel like real adults about it.
A month before we left, he tore his hip labrum and couldn't walk.
So there I was on Easter Sunday, driving an hour to San Diego with three kids, ages ten, seven, and three, to give the family the news. Everyone braced to feel sorry for me. Instead I said, "We leave Wednesday. Just me and the kids."
The whole table went "whoa."
I had asked my brother to come. Couldn't. Asked my brother-in-law. Couldn't. So I flew my aunt out to meet us for a couple of days in the middle, which turned out to be one of the best parts of the entire trip. The help you count on falls through. You go anyway, and you build the trip out of whoever actually shows up.
Two weeks. Three kids. One me. Italy.
That trip handed me something I've never given back. Permission. If a husband who couldn't walk, a three-year-old, and a ten-year pile of excuses weren't enough to stop me, I started to wonder what possibly could.
Permission to travel wherever, whenever, with whomever.
It was never a one-time act of bravery. It was a way of living.
Route 66 from Tulsa · through the Smokies · down to Florida
The trip that almost was the last.
I had a bucket list, and by thirty I'd nearly run out of it. Machu Picchu was the last thing left.
I'd already seen the pyramids, climbed Mount Sinai, swum with sharks in Belize, backpacked across Europe on my own. I'd married the girl of my dreams. House in the suburbs, a law practice that was finally taking off. I stood at the top of that mountain, looked down at the whole lost city, and figured there was nothing left I needed. I had done it all.
Two weeks later I was in a hospital bed, dying.
Leukemia. My practice came apart while I was too sick to hold it together, my wife was barely hanging on, and bankruptcy was already on its way. I was thirty years old, I had done everything right, and none of it was going to matter.
I lived. I decided in that bed that I was never going to have another bad day, and I've mostly kept that promise. That is where the name of this company comes from. This is your last life ever. Not the one after the kids are grown or the timing finally cooperates. This one, while you can still climb the mountain.
Urgency without a way to sustain it is just panic.
We came at this from opposite directions and landed in the same place. You don't have forever. The perfect moment is never coming. Put those two together and you'd think the answer is to frantically knock out a bucket list. It isn't. A finished bucket list is exactly what one of us had the day before everything fell apart.
The answer is to build a life that can actually hold adventure, so it becomes how you live instead of a photo you post once and forget. That takes five things. Take any one away and the whole structure wobbles.
- Purpose
- Habits
- Prosperity
- Adventure
- Community
The trips are where you feel it click. Then you take it home, and you don't switch back off.
Come find out what you were never actually stuck behind.
Small groups. Real places. A way of living you take home with you.
Start hereOne trip at a time. We'll show you the rest.