Don’t get me wrong, we have no intentions of retiring from traveling and we will still be sharing lots of adventures (plus I’m not even caught up sharing all of our past travels).  BUT we have indeed arrived back in the United States and it was time to figure out what we were going to do next.

More accurately, where we were going to live?

And you’ll never guess who picked our location… Our 9-year-old. Actually, he was eight at the time. How about if I explain?

As we started to plan coming back to the US, my hubby would ask the kids questions like, ‘where would you like to live.’ He asks them their take on things all the time so this was nothing new.

A couple days later Paysen came to him and said, ‘Dad? Where would I need to live to be able to go skiing, 4-wheeling, rock climbing, ride motorcycles, go hiking and fishing?’

Taylor answered off the top of his head, ‘I don’t know, Leavenworth maybe?’

That was the end of the conversation… Or so we thought.

A few days later, Paysen come into our room to let us know he’d found some houses on Zillow in Leavenworth that he thought we’d like and that he’d saved them for us to look over.

Who is this kid? 🙂

We humored him and looked and then we tried to explain why we wouldn’t be able to live in Leavenworth. The main reason being JOBS! He accepted our answer and that was that… Or so we thought.

Now here’s something some of you may find kooky but it’s something I really love that we do. As part of our kids night time routine they visualize. We’ve been doing this for about four years, and it really has been amazing for them and all of us.

Our routine is some variation of family prayer and scripture reading, and then they can read after they’ve said their personal prayers and last as they fall asleep they visualize. Their visualization is anything they want, we encourage them to visualize long term and short term goals.

Well, apparently – Paysen had been visualizing that we would live in Leavenworth and a few days later he told us as much.

So what is Leavenworth? Well, Leavenworth is a Bavarian “Village” Town up in the mountains of Washington about 2 hours from Seattle. It’s home to some of the best rock climbing in the state, a great place for river rafting and floating and it has tons of mountains, rivers, and lakes for hiking and fishing. In the winter it’s known for snowmobiling, is close to Stevens Pass for skiing and snowboarding and it’s arguably the most enchanting Christmas town in Washington.

It’s also a tourist town. And so again we tried to explain why we couldn’t live there since we need to be near the city. Again he accepted our answer… Or so we thought.

As you can tell, we now live in Leavenworth.

So here’s how the story unfolded. Paysen continued to visualize that we would live in Leavenworth every night and we continued to stress and worry over where we were going to settle in. Once we were back it didn’t change – he visualized without us knowing to live in Leavenworth and we tried to figure out what we should be doing next.

Then we went on our Ski trip to McCall and Brundage Mountain in Idaho. While we were there, both Taylor and I fell in love all over again with the feeling and culture of a resort town that is both magical in the winter and in the summer. We dreamed and talked about little else besides how we would love to have our own 2nd home for our family one day and how incredible it would be to have a place to escape to where we could just be us and enjoy amazing family memories.

And that’s when I suggested it – what if we started looking in Leavenworth?

We had sold our primary residence before leaving for our trip. What if, we bought our second home first! We could live up in Leavenworth for a while, make the place our own and then eventually turn it into an Airbnb and move back to the city. This was something we’d been talking a lot about (the AirBnB part). After living in AirBnB’s for almost 8 consecutive months we’d become something of experts at what seemed to work and didn’t and what made for 5-star reviews and what did not (but that will be a later post).

So we came home from McCall, ID and decided to just try! We figured that most likely it wouldn’t work out, after all, how many banks were going to want to give a home loan to nomads? But we decided we’d rather try and let them close the door then wonder what if.  So with a prayer, we went for it… Honestly, the whole time I just kept waiting for them to say no. But somehow they didn’t. Somehow we found the perfect little cabin in the woods for us, and somehow we were given the financing to make it happen.

We (the grownups) almost stopped this before it ever happened, I am so grateful for our little man who dreamed big and kept praying and visualizing for what he believed was best for us.  Taylor and I had been dreaming of having a place in Leavenworth since we first got married and now, all because of Paysen – we have it.

We closed and took ownership of our cabin in Leavenworth on Paysen’s birthday!

We can’t wait to share all about our adventures. We are going to be blogging and sharing tons of tips, tricks and what to do in Leavenworth for you! So stay tuned! Plus I’m going to be sharing more of our family life, renovating the cabin and of course, traveling!

If we’re not, we’d love to connect with you on Instagram!