EFRT UPDATE // Where Are We and What Are We Doing

Hi everybody. I thought I'd come out here and give a quick update. A lot of you have been asking whether we made it into Canada and so on. So here's the situation. About four days ago, I guess it was five days ago, we were down in southern New Mexico. We started to hear rumors of border closures and closures and so on. So we thought, you know what, time to pack up. Even though we had so much planned, so many trails we wanted to do. I mean, we just got our Jeep completed. And our goal was to get it done and then head to the west and start hitting those trails. And we got one under our belt. And those videos are going to be coming up soon with Lifestyle Overland with Kevin and Sarah and Caroline. We had so much fun out there. So I can't wait to share those videos with you. But we were going to go on and actually meet up with Chris from Venture Forward and do some trails in Arizona. But anywho, everything changed in a flash. We said, you know what, time, we just got to go. So we packed up everything and we had enough food on board. And we've got our auxiliary tanks from Long Range America. So we didn't have to stop for fuel that much, but we hit the road and started going straight north to Canada. So we drove from southern New Mexico to northern New Mexico, stopped overnight in a beautiful National Forest. And then from there, we drove right across the state of Utah and ended up in Idaho and stayed the night there, camped over and then got up early the next morning and headed all the way across Idaho, Montana to the Canadian border. And we are now in British Columbia on the east side of British Columbia in the beautiful mountains. You can't really see them with the cloud cover, but this is one of our favorite places. We actually rented this place last year and did a lot of snowboarding. And so I thought, where are we going to sit? They told us once you cross the border, you're going to have to do a mandatory 14 day quarantine. So we're not supposed to be driving around in case we're spreading the virus. We'd be spreading it from town to town as we go. So I thought, hey, let's see if that place we rented last year is available. And it was. So we were thankful to be able to get this place and sit still for a bit, which is not our typical thing to do. We're not sitting still very often, but it's a blessing in disguise. We're spending time. The kids are working on t-shirt designs. We're trying to get our store up and running. There's so many of you asking for epic family road trip and effort gear, and we're trying to get that store up and running for you. We're working on all kinds of other projects that we didn't really have time to do when we're moving, you know, on the trails all the time. And the kids are catching up on homework and so on. So we're working hard. We're sitting still, sitting on our hands because we're dying to get out and explore those mountains behind us. And I'm sure very soon we'll be able to do that once things settle down. But, you know, we're always trying to help, as are you, as all of us in a crisis. We want to help. And when you listen to the news, you listen to what they're saying. They say the best way to help is just to stay put. Don't go out. Don't go. Don't even go get groceries. Get things delivered. Do whatever you can, but stay in one place. That'll help kind of stop the transmission of this disease and hopefully sooner than later we'll be able to get back to normal. But I can imagine all of you are heavily affected by this, as are we. I mean, my business is the speaking business and that means big groups of people getting together and going to speak in front of them. It means airplane travel. All of that is over and shut down, at least for the foreseeable future. It'll be months and months and months before we'll be able to do any kind of conferences and speak in front of groups. So that was a bit of shock to the system. I'm thankful that I was able to compact a whole bunch of talks into January and February. That was unbelievable how that worked because it was at the end of February when all of this started to really make headlines and started to change things. On my last flight in February, there was a guy sitting beside me wearing a mask and he was a little embarrassed by it. But he said, hey, out of an abundance of caution, I'm wearing this thing, but I'm not sick. And that's when I thought, man, this could get weird. And sure enough, now you wouldn't want to be on a plane or without a mask. And you can't even walk down the road without or get fuel without wearing gloves. So it's definitely weird and different times. But I think if we all pull together, we all follow the instructions we're given, we don't try to do, you know, something outside of that, then we'll be able to shut this thing down and get back to normal life sooner than expected. So yeah, we're holed up here. We're all doing well. We've changed our plans. Obviously, we're not doing international travel this year. We were going to be spending an extended time in Arizona and Nevada and Southern California and up to where Carol's family lives in Oregon. We had so many places on the map that we were going to explore. That's all changed. So depending on how things go, we thought that, well, there's a lot of exploring to do in Canada. Why don't we go all the way up to Tuktoyaktuk, which is to the Arctic Ocean. But even now, we're hearing on the news that they're shutting down travel up there because it's a very sensitive community, of course, and they don't want anything to happen there. So that might be out of the question. We have plans to do the Labrador Road. That's a real remote epic road, and it's all off-road. And that would be on our list, but who knows. So right now, we're just playing it by ear. And we do have our place, our cabin on an island, which I think would be a great place to go once we are done with our isolation. So that might be our plan going just for the short term anyways. Stay put until we're free to go until that 14-day mandatory isolation is over, and then we might head to the island. It's still frozen in there. You can't put a boat on the lake yet, but in a couple of weeks, that'll all change. So anyway, there's an update of what we've been up to, what we're up to right now. I hope you guys are being safe and being careful and getting through this whole crazy crisis in good shape. Be safe out there, everybody, and stay tuned. We have some fun epic videos coming up.