WHY THE TAYLORS ARE TAKING A YEAR OFF TO TRAVEL
"What are your life dreams?" Jim asked Pam this question about seven years ago. The answers led us to this year of travel. We dream of traveling to new places and spending time together as a family. In pondering our family's long-term trajectory, we saw our kids ahead of their peers in school, having each skipped a grade. We want to maximize each person's enjoyment and our family togetherness, so we targeted the school year 2010-2011. In all this, we recognize our Heavenly Father's hand directing us. He has implanted desires and engineered circumstances that combine to make this an emerging reality.
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money." Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that." (James 4:13-15)
With the above Scripture in mind, we have established a plan. We left June 26, 2010 and, if the Lord wills, will return July 2011. We will spend eight months in the US, traveling by RV and visiting the forty-two states that we have not yet seen. Then we will fly to Europe. Landing in Geneva, Switzerland, we will go to Italy and work our way clockwise for five months.
