A Journey to Missoula
Some of you know I’m in Montana right now, and fewer of you know how or why. When asked to cover this week’s featurette, the first thing that came to mind was the journey that led us (my wife Rachel + our pup) to the small(ish) town of Missoula, MT. Here’s my attempt to share this journey with you all and digest everything that’s happened since we left Atlanta earlier this year.
The short answer is travel nursing. Here’s the long answer…
What is Travel Nursing?
It’s essentially a means to fill a gap between supply and demand for hospitals, wherever they may be. Rachel is a Labor and Delivery nurse, so patients on the brink of birthing babies are the demand in this case. Most hospitals in the US can’t consistently meet this demand with available nurses in the general area. This is where travel nursing comes in.
In the US, travel nurses work with recruiters at agencies who manage the relationships with different hospitals. Hospital recruiting determines which nurses ultimately get hired for the travel assignments, which generally last anywhere from 12–14 weeks. There are hundreds of various travel nursing agencies, so choosing the right one can be a pretty daunting task. Rachel interviewed several of these agencies before choosing one that worked out best for us.
Why Travel Nursing?
Rachel first found out about travel nursing as a junior in nursing school. Her plan was to start her first assignment in 2015, the same year we met, though once we started dating and becoming more serious, she thought it may never happen. We tossed the notion around a few times but didn’t seriously discuss it as a possibility until early 2019.
When she first told me about travel nursing, I thought it sounded like such a cool idea and lifestyle. How many people have the opportunity to do what they love while traveling around the US with the flexibility of moving to a new place or stopping pretty much whenever they want? Not many.
We both love traveling. Our first big trip together was to Iceland in 2016, and since then, we’ve visited at least one new country every year. We’ve now been around the World together but realized travel nursing could be the perfect opportunity to explore more of our own country throughout the next few years.
Forced Minimalism
It’s relatively common for travel nurses to lease furnished apartments during their travels to stay as mobile as possible. At some point, we decided it didn’t make sense to pay rent for a storage unit to hold an accumulation of depreciating stuff while we were gone. “Oh yeah, we’ll just sell everything and fit what we can in the car. It won’t be that bad.” We thought. Easier said than done.
At about 2 months out from our then unknown moving date, the madness ensued. Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Nextdoor, Mercari, Roshan Bhakta, The Dark Web, you name it. Any nonessential item had to go. It’s worth mentioning our definition of nonessential changed drastically as time went on.
Decluttering and downsizing were super painful at first. However, we channeled our inner Marie Kondo, and it became easier and easier the more we auctioned off. We became accustomed to sleeping on an air mattress in the final week before finding out about our first assignment.
Generally, a nurse should expect anywhere between a month to a month and a half of lead time before starting a new role. Due to the uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals were more unpredictable than ever with their hiring while we were searching for Rachel’s first assignment. We were finally able to lock down a position in Missoula less than two weeks out from the start date. Here’s where the story really gets interesting…
Picture This…
It’s early May 2020 on an evening unlike any other. Except there’s only about two hours left to go in your final shift at a job of seven years. You’ve been anxiously awaiting a phone call for weeks to give you some sort of a glimpse into your near future. Some sort of direction into what’s next for your life. Then out of nowhere, the subtle quiver of your phone interrupts your train of thought. You answer it…
- Apparently, Montana is your new home and
- you need to be there by the end of next week and
- you don’t have a place to live and
- you need to drive 2,100 miles to get there and
- you need to pack up and move out of your house and
- you need to fit your life in a car and
- you need to be on the road in 72 hours.
Pretty wild, right? Ok, this may be a bit dramatic. Still, these are some of the once far-off scenarios that suddenly became a reality. Through some miracle in an exhausting, stressful 72 hours, we managed to pack two cars to the brim, gift/goodwill/ship anything that wouldn’t fit in said cars, and make our home spotless before hitting the road.
2200 Miles
We left for Missoula in mid-May with a 32+ hour drive ahead of us. The trip was broken into 5 overnight stops: Atlanta, GA → Nashville, TN → Kansas City, MO → Sioux Falls, SD → Gillette, WY → Billings, MT → Missoula, MT. The first stop was Nashville, where we spent time with my family and celebrated my sister’s recent graduation. After a weekend that flew by way too fast, we continued toward Missoula, leaving one of the cars behind.
Overall the drive was pretty uneventful, and amazingly, we didn’t hit any traffic. Many states were locked down during our trip, which most likely contributed to the lack of cars.
Although the trip was overall pretty smooth, uncertainty around Missoula’s housing situation was a huge stressor. We took turns checking every possible ad on Zillow, Trulia, Craigslist, along with a multitude of travel nurse-specific websites for furnished apartments. Out of sheer luck with two days until our arrival, an Airbnb host agreed to sign a short-term lease.
The Zoo
Missoula, aka The Zoo, aka Zoo Town, is a picturesque town in Western Montana nestled in a valley with mountains visible on all sides. Initially starting out as a trading post, it was officially founded in 1864 and currently has a population of ~75K. It’s about an hour east of Idaho, four hours South of Canada, right in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.
Our daily life is pretty different from Atlanta and generally consists of a trail run with Lila on the nearby Waterworks trail, or a bike ride around town. Missoula has understandably been a great place to quarantine with various outdoor activities available like hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, trail running, and fly fishing.
We’ve made it a priority to visit as many national parks as we can during our travels, and so far, we’ve managed to knock off Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Glacier. Our favorite has, without a doubt, been Glacier, and we highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the outdoors. We’ve already been 3 times and are planning another trip for next weekend.
So what’s next?
We can’t be 100% sure. Denver is looking like a possibility, but staffing for travel nursing can be really unpredictable, as we learned during our first assignment search. The current plan is to stay in the western US for the first year before heading back to the East towards Atlanta.
Gratitude
I started reaching out to different contacts across Slalom in early 2020 to pitch ideas and was definitely expecting to hear negative responses at first. Unexpectedly, those who I spoke with focused on how to make the travel nursing work, rather than reasons why it couldn’t.
To wrap up this week’s featurette, I just want to thank the folks who helped us make travel nursing a reality: Mark Matson, Doug White, Rachel Lieberman, Michelle Yi, Alfredo Bird-Munoz, Todd Heil, John Tarbutton + many others. I’m really grateful to work with such an incredible group of colleagues. We have extra space for anyone who wants to visit 😄.
Cheers,
Ben