During the 12 years she spent as a corporate recruiter in Atlanta, Jennifer Remling was generally sound asleep at 2 a.m., resting up for another day at the office. At that hour last Wednesday morning, though, she and her husband, Joe, were maneuvering a gleaming new Airstream trailer into a parking spot at Chelsea Piers, after a couple hours of trying to find a Hudson River crossing that would let them and their propane tanks pass into Manhattan.
If this represented both an adventure and a change of pace, then Remling was meeting the main goal she’d had when she ditched her job a year ago, bored and unhappy after over a decade in the corporate world. And by arriving in New York, she was making headway on a second: to travel the country interviewing people who’d likewise left unfulfilling jobs to follow their passions, and write a book that might inspire other weary drones to do likewise.
“There’s so many people who aren’t happy with what they’re doing,” says Remling, 41, who’s adopted the motto “Carve Your Own Road.”
“They have dreams and aspirations, but they don’t think it’s realistic to pursue them. I want to raise awareness of other people who’ve made different choices, and give people the tools to do it themselves.”
The couple’s plan to hit the road came together last November, but the roots of it go back to the end of the ’90s, when Jennifer started to feel a creeping dissatisfaction with her career. A Houston native, she had fallen into recruiting when she and Joe, an architect, moved to Atlanta after graduating from Texas Tech. All was well at first – she was successful, and steadily climbing the ladder.
After six years, though, “I started losing steam. I had done all the things I wanted to do in the corporate world – I was a vice president, I had a large team, I traveled all the time. But I found it wasn’t fulfilling.”
Figuring out what she didn’t want to do was the easy part, though, and it took years before she finally gave notice one Monday morning – “the most liberating thing I’ve ever done,” she calls it. She started her own recruiting business, planning to use it “as a bridge to where I really want to go, which is speaking and writing.”
She soon conceived of the book; meanwhile Joe, 36, who’d recently left a big architecture firm to start a business with a few partners, was getting ideas about buying a trailer with a wireless Internet hookup, so he could travel and work at the same time. In an “epiphany moment,” it hit Jennifer that she could turn her research into a series of road trips they could take together.
The next stop was Airstream’s Ohio headquarters, where they pitched their idea, and were rewarded with free use of a 27-foot travel trailer with twin beds, flat-screen TV, a stove and a shower – “our W Hotel on wheels,” Joe calls it. (It helps that their timing was good – Airstream is developing vehicles for people who want to work on the road, and will solicit Joe’s design tips.)
The trip that brought them to New York last week, after stops in North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey, is the first of several the Remlings plan to take around the country, interviewing some 50 to 60 subjects. (In New York, interviewees included a marketing executive who started an organic baby-food firm and an executive recruiter who went into eco-design.
Soon they plan to start a blog and post interview clips on their Web site (carveyourownroad.com) – down the road they envision a possible documentary film as well as the book, which is being shopped by an agent.
Remling hopes to have the book done this winter, and out in time to do another tour next summer to promote it. Such a speedy turnaround is ambitious, she acknowledges, but whether they make it or not, the venture is already a success, the couple said as they kicked back in the trailer last Wednesday evening.
“We’re having a blast,” says Jennifer. “We pulled in last night at 2 a.m., and we looked at each other and said, this is totally insane, but it’s so much fun.”