Epic Medley Roadtrip 2, a Prologue /// A Traveling Zack

It has been very hard for me to find time to blog, though I've had more to write about than ever!

Recently, I was on a trip with my family, our second "epic roadtrip" as I like to call it. I attempted to blog about it with the Blogger app on my phone, but the app proved rather unwieldy and unreliable. So, I had to reserve my thoughts and photos for when I returned home. I've been home for a few days now, compiling notes, photos and videos.

The Epic Medley Roadtrip is becoming an annual family tradition. Last year, we spent 13 days on the road, with notable stops in Nebraska, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, Oklahoma and Missouri. I had a great time and took thousands of photos, which I still haven't finished sorting through!

This year, we had a plan for something even more extravagant! A 3-week trip in which we would visit some states and national parks that we had never visited before!

In the end, we spent 18 days on the road, with notable stops in Wisconsin, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California - and so many other beautiful states! We even drove through part of North Dakota and Montana, simply because we had never been to either state before.

You may have noticed that both trips included Utah, in fact, we stayed in Utah longer than any other state during both trips, because we were attending the Young Living International Grand Convention. The convention is a great time for us to learn about new products and hear speakers on a number of different topics from wellness to business building. Young Living has become a huge part of my life, and my family's, over the past couple of years as we've sought to improve our lives using plant-based products. (More on that in future blogs!)

In addition to seeing a lot of new things and having an all-around good time, I have been doing something during my trips in the past year... Taking photos of my travel mascot, a toy train named Stephen, in different locations around the country and even in England next to a full size replica of his real-life basis. During our second epic roadtrip I took more of these and even decided to step it up a notch... Creating some short videos of toy trains traveling around the country. One of my ambitions is to create children's entertainment for the internet and I figured this might be a good first step. So far, I've uploaded one of the videos to my YouTube.

I also bought my family matching t-shirts for the trip and named FF5's "Fire on the Highway" our official theme song. This made for some epic selfies!  Don't know how I'm going to top that for next year... Anyway, be sure to check out the FF5 music video and look out for our t-shirt selfies, trains and the post about the supercool FF5 concert I was at last summer in future as I break down this trip and previous ones over the coming posts!

Disclaimer: I do not own/endorse or work for Thomas & Friends/Mattel or FF5. Random, but thought I'd throw that out there. Just a fan.