How Our Roundabout Life Came To Be
We would like to take a moment and just share with you what Our Roundabout Life is, what you can expect to see here and how it came to be.
I guess to start, you would have to know it has always been our dream to travel the US in our camper. The problem, like I’m sure it is for so many, is how do you do that and still earn money to live on.
We’ve always had big dreams. We even tell our kids to dream big. "Aim for the moon and even if you miss you’ll at least land in the stars." The problem with that theory is if you dream too big it seems so unattainable that you never really do anything to help you reach that dream.
We realized that on April 3rd of 2019. That’s when Randal was diagnosed with breast cancer. Yes, male breast cancer. And what made it worse was it was Malignant Primary Breast Melanoma. So by definition it started out as skin cancer and moved to the breast. Because of it's location, we were told that it was most likely Stage 4 cancer.
As we are business owners and real estate agents we do a business plan at the end/beginning of every year. One part of that is we develop a 5 year plan outlining where we want to be in 5 years.
When I was first diagnosed my survival rate was 20% over the next 5 years. When you get that kind of news right after drafting a 5 year plan you quickly realize 5 years is too long. It’s too far away. Our dreams were too big.
So we set out to accomplish several things.
- To kick cancers butt
- Find ways to obtain our dreams now rather than later or never
- Travel more
- And document these journeys in hopes it would help others.
Which brings us to Our Roundabout Life.
We have always loved going to destinations in our camper and now we wanted that more than ever. But that meant becoming more location independent. So how do you do that? Luckily, being real estate agents we do have the ability to do some of that without having to be in a certain place everyday. We also have rentals which gives us a passive income from the rent coming in. We just needed to grow those areas. So a few weeks after surgery to remove the cancer we purchased another property to fix up and either flip or rent. So we thought that would be fun to document and show others how it can be done.
We were already documenting the cancer journey on social media and what was working and the things we were going through.
Then, we really wanted to document our travels. For a couple of reasons. One we feel like that by documenting it, it leaves something for us and our kids to see and enjoy later. And it also seems to amplify the experiences. When you are wanting to share it with others you tend to pay more attention to things.
We already had a YouTube page that we featured our real estate listing on with video tours. So we thought that would be a great medium to share these journeys with family and friends. But we didn’t want it tied into our business channel so we decided to start a new channel. With a new channel, comes the challenge of thinking of a new name for it. Since we have several different journeys we are wanting to share we needed something that could have different avenues or spokes coming from it.
I have long hated roundabouts. I’m from the south and until a few years ago there were no roundabouts around here. But there is a funny story of me getting “stuck” in a roundabout going to Dawsonville, Ga to a big outlet mall there. It was when gps was first coming out. And since I had never been there before I thought it would be a great way to try this new gps thing out. Well when they first came out they had a tendency to lag behind somewhat depending on where you were. As it would happen this roundabout had like 5 streets you could exit on. The problem is by the time the gps would tell me to exit and I reacted, I would get off on the wrong road. So then gps would tell me to do a legal u-turn which put me right back in the roundabout. And around we would go again. After about the fourth time missing the exit I should have took I was not very happy with the roundabout. The kids thought it was hilarious. To this day when we come up on a roundabout they give me a hard time about it. But it’s fun and it always gives us all a big laugh. Thankfully I’m better with roundabouts today than I was back then.
That story and the fact that roundabouts have several spokes or avenues coming off them is why we decided to name our channel Our Roundabout Life.
We hope this channel helps others see that even though life can throw you a curveball, there is still fun to be had if you are willing to see the good things out of people and life.
So our channel will include my story and journey of male breast cancer. It will also include home renovations and improvements so that maybe it will help other see that they can do it too and become financially independent.
And mostly we want to share our travels and adventures as we go across this wonderful nation and explore the beauty it has to share with us all.
So please be patient as we start rolling out videos in all of these areas. We will do our best to keep them so you can tell which ones are which so if you are only interested in one of those avenues you can only tune in to those.
Thank you for joining us on Our Roundabout Life.
