Update On Our Poker Pilgrimage

Amazingly, it has been a couple of years since we started this blog and shared with you our poker pilgrimage plan to travel the country playing poker all the way. Here in the Spring of 2021, we feel that we are moving ever closer to our year of travel, while at the same time unable to travel at all.

It is hard to even imagine a time when we will be free to play live poker again, let alone roam the country at will (possibly in an RV). As we have had to put our Poker Table Averages, our Room Reviews, and Map Updates on hold as the world goes crazy around us, we thought it was time to give those of you who read this blog regularly an update on our plans. (By the way, if you are looking for a resource on what poker rooms are currently open, Paul is updating such a page over at Advanced Poker Training).

Poker Pilgrimage Pre-Journey Travel Plan

We are currently hoping to start our “real” Poker Pilgrimage in the fall of 2022. At that point, our youngest kids will be entering their sophomore year of college and we will be giving up our lease and moving everything into storage for the big trip. We have a lot of work to do between now and then. Over the next year, we will be writing a lot more blog posts about our poker plans, our travel plans, and how we plan to continue to work our day jobs (and hopefully even increase our savings!) while living on the road. We have been working from home for a decade now, so the transition to digital nomad should not be that hard.

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We are, of course, not waiting for the big poker pilgrimage to get back on the road. In order to maintain our sanity, we have planned a number of trips across the next 18 months. Once we get vaccinated, and the pandemic has abated to a safe degree, we hope to resume our footloose and poker-full lifestyle sometime this summer. Trips we are currently researching:

Fall 2021

We hope to rent an Airbnb for a month somewhere in the Northeast. We are looking for a location that is close to poker rooms AND offers a lot of natural beauty. Hiking has kept us sane this year, so we would like the chance to hike a bunch of trails and enjoy the fall colors. We picked up hiking last spring when it seemed like the only way we could safely get out of the house. I used AllTrails to find every trail within an hour of our home. And we hiked. And we hiked more. We even started an Instagram account to share some of our hikes while we wait to be able to share new poker rooms again.

 

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We also have a secret dream that maybe the 2021 WSOP might be delayed until Fall this year (when much of the country will be vaccinated). If that were to happen, goodbye Northeast and HELLO a month in Vegas.

Spring 2022

Wherever we end up, we plan to return home for the holidays to spend time with our families (and our kids on their Winter breaks!) And of course, to spend a few days in Montreal. We then hope to head out in the spring – to California!

We were originally planning a long trip (two to three months) this fall. But then we realized that we might be looking at spending the whole time dodging wildfires. AND maybe we need to give this virus a little more time to fade into the background before embarking on a big trip involving numerous hotels, poker rooms, and restaurants. So next spring it is.

We will write more on this as we nail down the details, but the broad strokes of the plan would be to spend a week or so driving from Massachusetts to San Diego. Then spend a month traveling from San Diego up through California, visiting a variety of cities and poker rooms along the way. Kind of like our poker pilgrimage, but in miniature. And definitely without the RV. Finally, we will spend a week driving back across the country to make it home before the kids start their summer break. I have already declared that the trip home MUST include a stop at the House on the Rock in Wisconsin. I can just feel Paul rolling his eyes, but I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the kitschiness of the place.

Summer 2022

Finally, next summer we have three main priorities:

1. Spend at least two weeks at the WSOP! Hopefully, by 2022 the WSOP is back to its fabulous crazy self and we can enjoy the full experience in earnest once again. We may also take a side trip to the Grand Canyon this time and finally check that landmark off our list
2. Take a real trip in an RV. Sure, we are pondering buying an RV for our poker pilgrimage, but we have never so much as slept in one! We believe that an RV would be cost-effective for our big trip, but we need to decide if we can actually travel comfortably in one. So at some point next summer we plan to rent an RV for a two-week jaunt somewhere.
3. Finalize plans and preparations for our poker pilgrimage. That one is pretty self-explanatory. We will, of course, share our preparations along the way.

And in the fall of 2022, we plan to hit the road! It both feels so close and terribly far away.

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