This is that section where we answer the most common questions of “who are you?” and “why?”.
The quick answers are:
- we’re a couple from Seattle with a special-needs dog
- when we got kicked out of our home we decided to explore the great backyard that is the American West while we figure out our next steps
While a longer explanation could fill novels, we’ll keep it bite-sized. Let’s start with introductions.
Who we are
First, the most important member, Aviva the special-needs pitbull.
We rescued this sweet grandma-baby when she was three years old. She’s eleven now, blind on one side and deaf on the other, and recently recovered from major surgery (a quintuple mastectomy for developing breast cancer – so far she’s in remission).
She loves people, especially young children, but is absolutely terrified of other dogs and can get pretty loud about it.
She’s never been on a major trip like this before, and she’s handling it like a champion.
Then there’s the humans.
Connor is a writer, with a degree from Knox College for creative writing, although he’s spent the last twelve years writing a lot of technical documents and marketing decks more than anything else. Most of the work he’s done hasn’t even really been related to writing, leaning more towards project management.
Unfortunately, working in tech these days isn’t as solid a career as it used to be, and he was laid off in September 2025 and has likely since been replaced by a generative AI tool.
These days he’s been playing with his creative work again, particularly in the realm of animation and game design, and has developed an eye for taking bird photos.
Jessica is a game developer, something that probably started early in life but didn’t become a career until her thirties.
Her Knox College degree is in Psychology with a double minor of Art History and Japanese Language & Culture – so it might not come as a surprise that she now has roughly a decade of retail experience and only a couple years of software engineering under her belt.
Her only “office job” was with a small game development company on their core engine, but was laid off along with about 75% of the company back in 2024 to ultimately be replaced with generative AI.
It’s been a couple years of job searching and false starts, but she continues to work on her own projects and will hopefully have something publicly playable soon.
Why we’re doing this
Back in March of 2026 we had been living with friends in a house in West Seattle, Washington, and while things weren’t perfect, it was a home.
Unfortunately we were renting from people who did not care about our needs – we had flooding damage that never got fixed, the hot water had stopped working in the kitchen, half the electrical was damaged, and so on. Upon reflection, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when we got a call from the landlord telling us we needed to vacate, as despite our rent being paid on time they hadn’t bothered to pay the mortgage on our house. We negotiated time to pack up and figure things out.
By the time June rolled around, our former roommates had settled elsewhere and we still had no idea what to do or where to go, as a lack of income probably wouldn’t look so great to property managers when applying for housing, no matter how much is in our savings account.
Connor originally hails from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, and since moving out in 2014 hasn’t been able to spend real time with his family, so we decided family time was exactly what we needed. Once we decided on Chicago, it was only a matter of deciding how we got there.
There’s just something seductive about a road trip, the beckoning of an adventure just around the corner. Camping, fast food, weird truck stops and even weirder people – it all seemed like just the thing to break us out of our funk.
Plus, it’s America’s 250th, and we wanted to see the land and its people for ourselves for once.
We’re so excited to share our journey with you. <3