Becoming Barenaked

This isn't porn. Everyone always asks and some of our family thinks it is for sure...but it's not. This is our story of how we simplified our life. With kids and crap. So, no porn here folks, just a real emotionally written break up with the American dream. If that's your kind of porn, then I guess this is definitely for you. We are BareNakedFamily.com and we did what lots of people are doing these days ~ dropping out of corporate America, selling all the crap, pulling the kids out of school, buying an RV and hitting the road in pursuit of a new American dream. One of simplicity and quality time together as a family. Trading in careers for self fulfilling entrepreneurial lifestyles and hands on education giving us unfiltered learning. Except, we had to pioneer this trail back in 2001, long before the popularity of this lifestyle took off. The internet had a handful of blogs on it at the time and only two of them had to do with RV'ing. One of them turning out to be crazy religious nut jobs and not at all the kind of inspiration we were looking for. We spent months nearly breaking the internet trying to find some sort of proof that we weren't alone in our quest to break free from our successful lives in the American dream. Doing this at a time when social media, community, and connection were non-existent and if you wanted to share your status, you'd have to yell it from your front yard.At the pinnacle of our career and working for the two biggest companies in the world at the time, Dell and Microsoft, we had achieved success. A six figure income, three houses, cars, stuff, and a million dollar stock option we were defined as living the American dream. Meaning we also had no purpose, family time, and creativity left to do more of what we loved. Winning the mental lottery on a remote beach in Washington, we woke up. We decided to leave it all behind to pursue our vision of working, learning, and playing together as family and creating our own family business so that our kids would always be a part of everything we did. No more putting work above family, we set out to redefine what it meant to be a family in America. This book is completely handwritten from our personal journals detailing the emotional side of getting out of the machine. With no place to go online, we had to sort out the tasks of transitioning from one American dream to another ~ life on the open road ~ by ourselves. What we had were these handwritten thoughts and struggles that took us to the brink of insanity and moments of clarity allowing us to feel the most awake and the most alone at the same time. Sharing our pictures from these stories throughout the book, ties the this piece of art to the personality of our family and the epiphany of a lifetime. So, we invite you to read our most intimate thoughts and feelings of how we became barenaked. This is not a professionally written book and is not intended to be. These are personal writings coming out of our head and have misspellings and mistakes as they were being written in the moment. We have put this book together to share our personal journals unedited and raw. BareNaked.