Meet Lindsay McKenzie

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsay McKenzie.

Lindsay, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
When sharing about this transformational journey I’ve been on, I really love to start way back when I was a little girl. I was the type of child that liked to have a plan – a perfect plan. I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up and more than anything I wanted to be a wife and a mom and dreamed of how and when it would happen. For awhile my plan for life was working out. I became a Kindergarten teacher like I’d always hoped and worked hard to achieve,

I found a great husband and we were building the so-called American dream. We had a house in the suburbs and stability in our finances and careers (despite the debt we had incurred with student loans, financing our home and cars, and filling our lives with material possessions). The only thing left was that mom piece, which is where my perfect little plans fell apart.

After a long and tiring process of struggling to conceive, my husband, Dan, and I received the unexpected news that he is unable to have biological children. And even after continuing forward with fertility treatments, we kept running into the same dead-end and it felt like my plans for my life came to a screeching halt. Meanwhile, I also unexpectedly lost my only brother at a young age, so the grief was very heavy.

In that season of loss and pain, I was desperate for a solution or “road map”, if you will. But little by little I began to find purpose in my pain and believe deeply that there was a greater plan behind all of this. I felt like I was faced with the choice to feel stuck at this dead end, or pick my head up and find an alternate path – a “detour”.

My husband and I fell in love with this perspective of a life detour. It gave us hope that while one road had closed, there was another one waiting for us that we believed could offer new exciting opportunities and we were eager to embrace it. While it was a bit terrifying to walk away from my plans, with no clue what was ahead, we went for it and haven’t looked back since.

Along this detour, I faced one of the hardest decisions of my life. I walked away from my dream of being a teacher and a career that I had intense passion for and so much of my identity wrapped up in, to pursue a new dream. With this shifting mindset of a detour, I felt the need for a physical shift as well and knew that in order to fully accept this new perspective, I needed a big change. We decided to go after the only thing in life we were 100% confident about and that was our love for travel and adventuring together. So we hit the road in an RV and embarked on building a lifestyle of full-time travel.

When we made this decision, I had no plans for how I would make an income and honestly was clueless as to what skills I had outside of the classroom. I took a giant leap of faith and forced myself completely out of my comfort zone. The one thing I did have was the domain www.FollowYourDetour.com and the bare bones of a website that Dan designed. I also had a desire to document this journey and hopes of inspiring others to follow their own detours.

I began seeking out any opportunities, even low paying and non-paying positions, to learn new skills and network with other travelers. This risk-taking behavior was like a domino effect and the more challenges I faced, the more I sought out. Fast forward to today, two and a half years after hitting the road, and I’ve achieved some of my biggest life goals, both personally and professionally. I’ve written and self-published a book, turned my blog into a business, started other side businesses to support our travel lifestyle, ran a half-marathon, skydived, and am loving the person I’m becoming more and more each day.

More importantly, I’ve found peace in not having a plan in life. I’ve learned that it’s not about the destinations you want to go, it’s about who you become along the way. I value the struggles in life because they help you grow and I believe that they present you with detours that can turn out to be greater paths than you could’ve ever imagined. They lead you to father places if you’re willing to follow them.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I shared most of the obstacles, challenges in my previous answer. It hasn’t been a smooth road at all, as you can tell from my “dead end” metaphor. But I’ll expand a bit on the struggles…

Quitting my job and walking away from everything I had invested into that career. I was only in the profession for 6 years, but I had given my heart and soul to my students and their families. I went to college specifically for that degree and even went back for a Master’s degree, plus put in hundreds of hours in professional development courses. I essentially feel like I was throwing that all away with no plan for what I’d do instead.

We also struggled with how our loved ones perceived our decision. We knew that many of our friends and family thought we were being irresponsible or “running from our problems”. But we ignored the feelings of needing to explain ourselves and listened to our hearts. We’ve learned to no longer seek the approval of others when making decisions in life. We aim to live a different way and therefore our decisions will be very different, it’s really that simple.

Come to think of it, in many ways, I still struggle on a daily basis. It takes a lot of hard work to sustain this lifestyle that we’re building. Being an entrepreneur has been one of the hardest challenges of all. We’ve had to put in a lot more hours with little return, it’s felt isolating at times, we’ve wanting to give up more times than I can count, and we’ve had to dig deep in our faith and trust in our goals and vision. Every day we take teeny tiny steps, but after a while, we’ve been able to look back and see how far we’ve come. Building a strong mindset and finding courage and confidence requires daily practice for us.

We still have a lot of uncertainty along our detour and our future, which can cause anxiety every now and then. Once you believe you can make anything your reality, it almost becomes harder because you’re faced with more decisions and challenges to constantly be moving forward. But it’s worth it!

Please tell us more about your work.
We’ve grown Follow Your Detour into a little blog about our feelings and travels into a thriving website that offers inspiration and practical tips for building a lifestyle full of travel like ours, especially the RVing travel style. My book, Follow Your Detour, obviously came out of the blog as well, but our greatest success with the site has been the opportunities and relationships we’ve leveraged through it.

We’re now often getting paid to travel and that’s been the greatest reward for us! We’ve partnered with major brands and large companies for a variety of fun projects that hardly feel like work. For example, we were paid to host an 11 episode web-based travel show called The Happy Camper Bucket List with Camping World. It was literally our “job” to travel all across the U.S., stay in some of the best RV parks an campgrounds, and have incredible experiences while showcasing it all on camera to share with others.

What’s even cooler though is that we’ve received hundreds of emails and messages from people through our website, my book, and social media, that we’ve helped them in some small way. From having the confidence to seek out and go on their own adventures, to heal from similar dead ends and embrace their own unique detours. More than anything, whether we continue RVing full-time or not, we want to always be transparent with our readers. We want to share the highs and lows and always be honest about the challenges and rewards of our journey. Our greatest motivator is to be an example to others than you can create your own path in life no matter what!

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I truly believe that every part of my journey has had a significant impact on where it’s led me. I don’t believe in wrong decisions because as I said, they are critical in teaching you lessons you need to learn to get you where you’re destined to go. I don’t want to live with regrets and don’t like to look in the past unless it’s to enjoy the view from how far I’ve come. I’m proud of the successes and the failures!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.followyourdetour.com
• Email: lindsay@followyourdetour.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/follow_your_detour
• Facebook: facebook.com/followyourdetour
• Twitter: twitter.com/followurdetour
• Other: Book: www.followyourdetour.com/book (also available on Amazon, which is linked on that page)

Image Credit:
All photos are our own, except the one of us in the sunset standing on an RV. That was taken by Joe Hendricks (joehendricks.com)

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