2022 LIFE UPDATE (what's next?)

No.

I love it.

I would like to apologize for this thing growing on my upper lip, as you can see. Kara would like me to keep it. I would prefer to shave it. So let's do this. If this video gets 50,000 likes, then I can shave my mustache. Deal.

I just want to make it known that yesterday Nate asked me if I had a fine tooth comb.

Well, if it's going to be there, it might as well look good. It has been six weeks since we filmed a video. Yes, we filmed a lot of videos in October and November of last year. And it's been six weeks since we picked up the camera. So if things feel weird and off they are.

Okay, where do we start?

I think this is going to be the most raw video we've posted on YouTube in the past two years. I feel like over the past couple years, our videos have become very storyline orientated. Oriented? Is orientated a word?

I don't think so.

If something doesn't fit within the storyline, then it doesn't get talked about. So we decided we wanted to kind of reconnect and fill you in, starting.

With the fact that we are back together. We appreciate your concern about our relationship, which.

Fair enough. If you only follow us here on YouTube and you saw us separate for four weeks and then we didn't post for three weeks, I would be concerned. But there was never anything wrong with our relationship. Do you think people will believe that?

Yeah, because if you follow us on Instagram, you know that we've been happily reunited for the last six weeks. Instagram is where I literally post daily updates in real time of our life. And if you don't follow us there, you're really missing out, imo.

Mmm.

Speaking of Instagram, I spent two full days. And when I say full days, I.

Mean, like the first two days of 2022. If you made New Year's resolutions to, like, work out, be productive, any of that stuff, that's not what Kara did.

I sat right going through every single photo and video that I took in 2021. I had this idea to do like a 2021 recap on my Instagram story. And it seems super simple. Like, just find, like, one quick thing from each trip that we took this year. And, you know, it was so much more than that. It kind of turned into this behind the scenes look at every decision we made in 2021, and I think it.

Turned out super interesting. It's a lot of the behind the scenes of what you don't see on YouTube as far as, like, our thought Process goes for filming videos and what we decided to do versus what we decided not to do and why we paused our 50.

So I saved it as a highlight so that it didn't disappear in 24 hours, because that would make me very sad.

Turned into a long plug to please follow us on Instagram in 2022. Okay, moving. But that wasn't the point. Should we go back to, like, our relationship and being split up and then being reunited?

Yeah.

If you watched our videos towards the end of last year, you know that the story was that I decided to stay in Greece to run a marathon. And that's why we parted ways because.

My cousin was getting married in the U.S. also, my sister was having her first baby in the US So I was coming home no matter what. And I don't run marathons. So Naming and Beg invited him to Morocco. And everybody was like, why is Nate traveling without Kara? Why is Kara home? What's wrong?

It was genuinely because Kara had family commitments and I wanted to run a marathon.

So Nate flew home on a very fancy flight. That's the last time he saw us on YouTube.

Why are fish eggs like the fanciest thing you can eat?

And then I flew home from Dallas, and Nate picked me up at the airport.

It was the weirdest moment of 2022. 1. We're, oh, yeah, I'm normally the one being picked up, not the one doing the picking up. So that felt weird in the first place. But then for Cara to be the person that I was picking up, and we had been apart for the longest time in six years.

So we reunited. We're in the parking lot. We're like, oh, Mrs. Too Much. And then we get in the car, and we're like, oh, miss you so much. And then all the honking started.

Oops.

It was around the holidays. Everybody was frustrated. It was very busy, but it was great. So we reunited shortly before Thanksgiving. Did Thanksgiving with our family in Nashville, then flew to Mexico. Spent three weeks surfing in Mexico. I feel like I can kind of say that now. Like, normally I say spent three weeks attempting to surf, but, like.

I mean, we're not good. But, like, we surfed. We're. I still can't say we're surfers. I started to, and then it just didn't come out.

So since we filmed so many videos, we didn't film that. That was just kind of an end of year off camera.

We needed a break.

Yeah, it was so great. If you follow us on Instagram, you would know that.

And if you think to yourself, oh, must be nice just to be able to take three weeks off and go surf in Mexico. It was really nice. But also, we still squeezed in eight hours of work a day.

Yeah.

I would wake up before the sunrise, work for a few hours, go surf, come back, work the entire afternoon, and then. Okay. So after that, we flew to Dallas to spend Christmas with Kara's family and who technically lives in Nashville, but Kara's sister lives in Dallas, who just had the baby. And then the baby just attracted the whole family to Dallas.

And we're still here.

We moved into a hotel, and we're calling this our 2022 retreat. So we've been reflecting on last year and making plans for this year and.

Just being with each other and having uninterrupted conversations, as simple as that sounds. We've literally been either filming a really intense video or with other people since. What did we decide? September.

Yeah, August, pretty much.

And so we just needed this time to, like, see how each other's doing and plan our future. We had no idea when we checked into this hotel December 31st what we were doing in 2022. Zero plans.

If we're being honest, we're going through a little bit of an identity crisis. The first four years of our channel was defined by this goal to visit 100 countries. Then shortly after we finished that, we went to Antarctica, and then everybody kind.

Of had an identity crisis.

The world shut down because of the pandemic. And then we bought a van, and we became the. And then I feel like 2021 just got even more confusing, because at that point, we were so kind of the van people. But the world started to open back up, so we started to do a little international travel again.

And then we discovered all these physical challenges.

And so it's like, is this a Van Life channel? A physical challenge channel? Is this an international travel channel?

It seems like with YouTube, most channels have to fit, like, in a box. Like, this is what our channel is about. And for four years, we had that box, and we were very happy with that box of going to 100 countries. And then once we hit that goal, yeah, I think we've been a little directionless, but we've spent a lot of time, especially my two days, going through all my photos on my phone, reflecting on this past year. And I think now more than ever, we are super, super confused. Well, in addition to being confused, like, y' all have showed up for all of our little phases, and we never have to wonder, like, oh, does this idea that we have that we're really excited about make sense on our channel. But I know it can be a hard place to be as a viewer, because if you found our channel because of our Van Life series, you probably want to see Van Life videos, and you never really know when those are gonna come. Or if you found our 29 out of 29 video, you probably think, oh, these people must do physical things all the time. Not really.

We're not ultra endurance athletes. We're kind of Van Lifers.

I know there's a huge audience for, like, aviation stuff and flying, and we do that a lot too. But sometimes we live in a van. Like, we're just kind of all over the place. And so we think it's so cool that we're able to do all of those things, but y' all still show up and support us, and we just truly could not ask for more.

But we've also spent the last few days, like, trying to, like, figure out who we are and what this channel is, and we're probably putting way too much pressure on it, but I think we just kind of feel more confused than ever right now.

What we're trying to say is thank you, thank you, thank you for following our journey.

One thing that I've been thinking about as we've been trying to figure all of this out is, like, what's the recipe for what we end up deciding to do? And I think it boils down to this crossover between what people are excited to watch and what we're passionate about doing. So if you think about it as two circles, one circle being what we're passionate about, and then the other circle being what people want to watch, where those two circles cross over that. That little area in the middle, that little area in the middle.

Those are the. Those are the videos that we decide to film. It's this weird balance because, like, in some ways, you could say, who cares if you enjoy it or not? Making YouTube videos is your job. So, like, just make the thing that people want to watch. And sometimes I feel that way. But then also, for us to make a good video, we have to be enjoying what we're doing.

It's a hard balance.

You can't have one without the other. And I also feel like it's kind constantly shifting. Like, that circle of what people are interested in watching kind of moves around.

Are we making any sense?

This kind of turned into a therapy session.

What? I seriously don't even know what we were trying to talk about.

I don't either. We've lost it. We've lost everyone. This is the most fun that I've had since entering this hotel room was putting all of our dreams for 2022 on this calendar. How honest are we gonna be? Like, are we about to tell people what's in this?

As long as you promise not to hold us to anything we say in this whole calendar.

Anytime we put something on this calendar, Cara kept saying, it's just gonna be fun to keep this calendar so that when we do none of these things, we can look back on what we thought we would do at the beginning of 2022.

It's true.

So this will change. You may realize that there's. There's nothing in the month of January, but we'll come back to that. Wait, is there anything in February?

Okay, well, should we even explain, like, what this is and why? I mean, everybody knows what a calendar is.

This is a calendar.

We've never done this before.

We wanted a visual representation of 2022. I know there's plenty of digital calendars, but we wanted to, like, be able to see all the big adventures that we were really excited about. I feel like we're revealing so much. Well, maybe we shouldn't. Okay, ready? If the stars align, the number one thing on my bucket list for 2022 is to go to the North Pole van. Life in Sardinia. Let's call it Ragbrai in Italy. Event.

Will be the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Painful thing we've ever done. I also want to survive on a deserted island. So, yeah, those are our exact plans for 2022. What are we doing next next week?

We don't know.

We realized we had a lot of plans for, like, the entire rest of the year, except for the month of January.

There are a few reasons for that. So you may remember the last time you saw the van. I drove it from Nashville to Dallas to be with my sister and her new baby, and it's been here ever since. I just spit on the counter. Because the plan was to, immediately after the holidays, get back in the van and drive it down the Baja peninsula? We're still gonna do that. But while we were surfing in Mexico, we were like, how cool would it be if we had a roof rack and something to put our own surfboards on so we can surf all the way down the coast.

On our trip, we decided that there were a few upgrades that needed to be made to the van to truly be able to enjoy that drive. And it's one of those things that, like, we're super excited about. So we want to make sure we do it right. Everybody in the world wants a van right now. Wants all the stuff to go with van. So it's really hard to get specific stuff, fan product. So basically we can't get the roof rack and the other stuff that we need until the first week of February. Which leaves us with this random month of January to figure out what we're gonna do before we do this big road trip down the Baja Peninsula.

We have thought of 25,000 different trips that we could take.

We almost went to Sri Lanka, Nicaragua, Canada again. There have been a lot of plans for this blank month on the calendar.

Are we gonna say it?

We decided to go on what I think is probably the most epic two month road trip that you could ever take.

It's gonna be like the van life dream.

So we have to get from here to San Diego. And we decided the most fun way to do that would be up through New Mexico, Colorado and then back down through Utah. And the plan is to make some modifications to the van so that we can live out of the van and, and be ski bumps for the next month. It's just crazy that you can do this. We'll go and do a month of skiing and then start driving south and then we'll do a month of surfing as we go down the Baja Peninsula. Just the fact that you can do those back to back. Yeah, like you don't have to fly to the other side of the world to go to a new climate. We're literally just, we're taking our home with us as we go to spend the month skiing and a month surfing.

It's going to be sweet. I think.

I'm a little nervous.

I feel like, like going back to those two circles, we're really putting a lot of emphas on the thing that we're passionate about right now. Last year we spent one week in Montana learning how to ski with my family for the first time.

It was an absolutely incredible week. And when we looked back on last year, it was one of our favorite weeks of the year. So we want to see if skiing is for us. Like, was it a one time thing that we just like really enjoyed for a week? Or do we want skiing to be a part of our life moving forward? And I think this is a way to test it out and hopefully a way to test it out affordably. Like in my mind right now it's this really romantic idea of going and like living in the parking lots of ski resorts and just like opening our sliding door, walking out with our skis getting straight on the slopes, making soup.

At night in our cozy warm van, where I have my pine and cinnamon diffuser going. There's a lot of like romantic ideas that I have about it, but I also know it's gonna be cold, dirty van packed with gear.

This is true. Yeah. The romantic thing that we just described, I think is one vision. But we could also describe it, I think in a way that makes it sound really miserable, which is like always kind of cold, having to put on cold, damp, soggy long johns. Honestly, I think the thing that we value most in our lives and the biggest benefit we see is to this channel and everything that we've been building over the last six years is the freedom that we have to make our own decisions and do the things that we're most excited about. So we give you all of these plans with the caveat that at any time they could change. Right now, this road trip is what we're most excited about. If an incredible opportunity presents itself in the month of January or February, there's a chance that all these plans change.

We have pretty short attention spot.

With that said, before we get started on all of these adventures, there is one video that we filmed over the holidays that was kind of more of a personal passion project.

The next video you see will be a little random, so we kind of wanted to give you a heads up and some background.

My 86 year old grandfather, who you've seen help me with our van and some of our past videos, is now renovating his own van. He's trying to get it like full camping ready so he can go explore the state parks in Tennessee. And we just thought it was a, a fun crossover between something that we hope that you'll be interested in, which is like the van life stuff and then also a way to kind of like give you a more personal look into our lives. And I just think like, my grandfather is one of the greatest humans that's ever lived and the Internet should see more of him. And hopefully this is part one of kind of like a bigger idea which is to ultimately do van life with my grandparents. We're totally doing a vlogmas, a van swap with my grandparents.

In case I wasn't clear enough before, I just want to look you in the eye and make sure that you know, we are so thankful for you, whoever you are watching this video. Thank you for being a part of our community.

It's not lost on us that the reason we have gotten to sit here and dream and put all of our biggest goals and adventures on a calendar is because you show up and watch them. And we could not be more grateful for that.

It's crazy. I can't tell you how many times we look at each other and we're like, this is our life. We have a lot of hard days, too. It's not all amazing, but, like, even on those hard days, it's, like, even more so on the hard days. I think.

I think looking back at 2021, the thing that we were most grateful for was you. You being the person watching this video and this entire community that continues to allow us to pursue the things that we're passionate about. And we became even more grateful when we realized that how random those passions are. So thank you. Also, please like this video so I can shave my mustache.

Do you think that we should stop petting it?

I don't know if we've made sense at all. Yeah, definitely.

Thank you. If you've watched to this point, who knows how long this video is gonna be?

I think sitting in a hotel for a week and trying to plan our lives is a bad idea. Moving forward. I think we're in a weird place right now.

Love you. Love you. This will be fun.

Do you want to see if we forgot anything?

Oh, my gosh. We forgot.