All 48: Drive Your Dreams

By Wiliam Hollingworth

"All 48" is an inspiring self-help book about a young couple's journey trying to find themselves and achieve personal growth. From rags to riches, they embark on a remarkable journey through military service, jobless veteran status, to college graduates traveling through North America.

In this uplifting account of life well lived, readers will follow the journey of a couple who grew from terrified teen parents to established travelers. Along the way they discover the hottest and most hidden stops and even more importantly, themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667800165

Book preview

cover.jpg

© 2021, William and Jessica Hollingworth.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66780-0-158

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66780-0-165

Contents

Preface

Chapter One: About Us

Chapter Two: Out of Nowhere

Chapter Three: The First Step, The First Trip

Chapter Four: Speeding Up

Chapter Five: A Grand Slam

Chapter Six: Round Trip

Chapter Seven: Haters, Doubters, and Critics

Chapter Eight: Second Round and Some Second Thoughts

Chapter Nine: Educated

Chapter Ten: Great Waters

Chapter Eleven: The Point of The Trip

Chapter Twelve: Rebound

Chapter Thirteen: Home Stretch

Chapter Fourteen: Travelers

Chapter Fifteen: Crossroads

Chapter Sixteen: Quick Trips

Chapter Seventeen: The Coolest State

Chapter Eighteen: Road Warriors

Chapter Nineteen: The Last Lap

Chapter Twenty: Hill Country Heaven, Holes of Hell

Chapter Twenty-One: Trip Half Empty, Journey Half Full

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Finish Line

Chapter Twenty-Three: Aftermath

Chapter Twenty-Four: It’s Your Turn! Road Trip Like A Pro!

Our Trip Layouts

Epilogue

Preface

First of all, thank you to every one of you awesome individuals for taking some time with this book! We are absolutely thrilled to have someone like you reading or hearing our story and my only hope is there are elements to take, that will help you add some awesome, stand-apart moments in your own life! Now, I promise I will make this book entertaining and empowering and most importantly, I will avoid long-winded rambles! This testimonial is going to give you a direct formula to travel the forty-eight contiguous (Connected) United States, while offering some alternative methods so you can fine tune the plans to best fit you. No click bait, no money schemes, just no-nonsense travel testimonies!

Throughout the book, I’ll share our stories, routes, and stops, but ultimately, our goal is to inspire you to go anywhere and dream anything, even with crappy budgets and short time windows. All you really need is determination and strategy and before you know it, you, your family, and your friends can make anything happen! In the end, our wish is for you to do whatever you set your heart and mind to. My goal was to visit all forty-eight United States, and travel to Mexico and Canada with my wife Jessica while we are still in our twenties, a pretty tall order for a broke young couple without Instagram followers!

I’m not going to bore you with a glossed-up version of how I was inspired to write a novel and the sun broke through the rain just right causing a ray of shine to bounce off just right where the universe spoke to me. No no no, a book was never the plan when we started our journeys, it was simply passion and self-commitment. We wanted to travel, wanted to grow, wanted to break the labels put on us as teen parents, and mostly, we wanted to show our son Colt we could do better, that he was what made us work harder.

Chapter One:

About Us

I am so truly grateful my childhood dreams didn’t come true, this colorful reality has become so much better than anything I could ever imagine. I’m going to catch everyone up to speed on our characters so you know who we are and why if we could travel the connected forty-eight states and two countries on our budget then literally anyone and everyone can and should , if they want to. But first, did you read the preface? Did you really? Well, if you haven’t you should! It’s short, it’s informative and it’s going to provide you with context for this book, so real quick, go back and read it please!

Alright well, about us: we are from San Antonio, Texas (I believe location is an important element to our specific routes and strategies for our road trip journeys). Jessica and I have been together since high school; meeting as teenagers living down the street from each other. Jessica a year older than me, became pregnant one whole month after I turned sixteen (put the blame on her, she’s the cradle robber)! We didn’t come from wealthy families by any stretch, both being hard working blue collared households without a college degree between them. Jessica’s parents are in fact first generation Americans, building a hopeful future on the sacrifices made by immigrating parents. These aren’t negative aspects by any means; but I am trying to paint our picture for everyone. To put this honestly, if you listed these elements out on paper, you would have to assume the two of us were en route to becoming a sad statistic, which honestly many of our family and friends saw as the case. Looking back now, we can’t even

blame them!

But here is where our X factors come into play, which I encourage everyone to keep in mind if you are someone you know is also in a seemingly rock bottom situation. What our families may not have had in finances or education, they held abundance in another form of wealth. Both sets of parents were incredible examples of rock-solid marriages, with 100% love and support! I promise you in terms of a growing relationship, this became more valuable than all the currency in the world.

So how the heck did we grow from poverty-class, married teens to traveling the entire connected United States in a four-year period and by age twenty-six? That’s total ten years’ time from baby Colt’s birth to having reached our goal. To begin, I have always worked my entire life. In fact, I worked so much as a youth for my sixteenth birthday, the only thing I wanted to do in celebration was apply for jobs! Landing my first official employment at the local Dairy Queen that very day, the birthday gift I requested from my parents was simply a bicycle enabling me to ride back and forth to said job until I could earn my own car for the commute. At the time of Jessica’s pregnancy, I had upgraded to gas station clerk, I immediately picked up more shifts and started hunting for higher paying jobs that would still allow me to attend school. Jessica found a state program for dropouts, students behind in grades, and kids in our situation that enabled us to complete high school at our own pace! This is seriously a thing; please look into programs like these if you or someone you know are in academic need. The program allowed me to graduate early still sixteen and Jessica was able to finish school before baby Colt’s birth in March 2011!

From here, I moved into a full-time day job and enlisted in the United States Army in December at seventeen years old. At such a young age I had to convince my parents to sign me in; meaning I accomplished this by informing them if I had to wait to sign up myself, I would be enlisting into the Marine Corps— a thought that got them on board pretty quick! Meanwhile, Jessica looked after Colt and enrolled in further education courses with the help of financial aid at a local community college. On February 24, 2012, Jessica and I got married at the county courthouse in front of the County Judge and a single photographer (Romantic I know, but it’s okay, don’t cry). The funniest (Or embarrassing) part, Jessica now eighteen but myself still not a legal adult also had to get my parents onboard enough to sign for me to obtain my marriage license as well!

In May of 2012, just ten days after my eighteenth birthday, I left for the U.S. Army, enlisted as a Medic and completed my four-year term, leaving the military in 2016. Now one would assume I did all my travelling while in the military, right? Meh, not so much. My basic training was in Fort Benning, Georgia, medic school brought me back to San Antonio, Texas, and then for my duty station I was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas just two hours north of San Antonio. While I did get deployed to Kuwait and was stationed there for nine months, this was the extent of my military expeditions. I hadn’t been to many places by this point in time and while my family had driven out of state maybe three times during my childhood, my first time even on an airplane was the trip to basic training.

Before finishing my term, my dad had been able to find an old house in the neighborhood I grew up in that needed a lot of work. He remodeled the inside floors, walls, and put on a new roof, making me a deal that if I was willing to tackle the rest, we would work up a payment plan so that I could buy a great first house for me and my family. With a handshake to seal the deal and my return from deployment, we used up my leave time and saved money getting our home ready while I finished the remainder of my Army career. Again, this is to set the stage, so everyone can confirm we have not really travelled on our own as adults by this point and were still financially below average.

After leaving the military,