A little over a year ago, I started vanlife. I had the opportunity to get a converted schoolbus and make an attempt to live cheaper while at the same time getting to see America first hand. It was scary as hell, but I made a choice. While I was young enough, I decided to do something else. I decided to live on the fringe. I knew my life in a cat piss-smelling apartment (I don’t even own a cat), working just to be poor wasn’t for me anymore. Life on the road would be uncertain. I would be at the mercy of the elements, strangers, and I would have to rely on my own skills to survive.
A Brief Rant
My generation was taught the pledge of allegiance in school, we did Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, 4H. We voted. We went to college. We married and made families. We got divorces and paid lawyers thousands of dollars to fight over the right to our children as well as the CD collections we amassed from Columbia House that we never finished paying for. Some of us went off to war. Many of them never came home.
Weren’t we patriotic enough? Didn’t we love our country unconditionally? But how many of us can honestly say we know anything about this land we call home that hasn’t been fed to us by the media or some textbook thirty years ago? We work hard. We pay into a system that is supposed to take care of us when our bodies are brittle and broken and the food we eat has atrophied our brains and plaqued our hearts.
Any money we have saved up will go to pay nursing homes and hospice. We sure as hell can’t go anywhere on our retirement, or if we can, we are too stoved up or shoveling prescription drugs into our mouths just to get up and move in the morning to even consider an adventure. So what does that leave us?
Voting in “elections,” doing our civic duty, paying taxes on the food we need to live, the cars we have to drive? We might have gotten a handful of one week vacations to a beach someplace. Maybe we got to rent a boat and spent the whole day plastered on lite beer on a lake somewhere. We got to bathe in the glow of celebrity lifestyles on TVs, which sucked our attention spans to below critical levels, living vicariously through people we would never meet. Taking sides for leaders that could hardly care less if we lived or died. Families. Fucking families are divided enough to stop talking to each other over this cultish worship of empty promises and government personalities following the agenda to lift up the rich and bury the poor.
Perspective
If I sound a little bit ranty, it’s because in the last year, I gained perspective. On the news, we are taught to fear our neighbor. Out here, I’ve seen some scary folks, but around 90% of the people you meet aren’t much different than you. They just want to be happy. They want to live in peace. They want to hang out with friends and family. They want to fall in love. They want to feel safe. They want to help out however they can. This is the real America.
I need to get to the point.
The first year I was traveling was a steep learning curve. I hit the road hard and I lived it up to some degree. I connected the dots with National Parks. I ate succulent meals. Some nights I froze my ass off. Other times I drove rough roads I had no business being on. I met interesting people, and some real nut jobs. I spent a lot of time alone. Sometimes to the point where I felt myself getting weird.
I would talk to myself. Talk to my dog. I would scroll through social media for hours upon hours, if I could get a signal. I worried a lot about money. Everything on the road is expensive—just like it is in a house—and I was always watching my bank account dwindle. Gasoline. Water. Food. Bills: insurance, child support, credit cards, car payments, phone and internet. Propane. Kerosine. Tires. Repairs. Just like in a house.
I learned what didn’t work and what did. I understood that line between wants and needs, as well as some game-changers that make life on the road pretty comfortable. (Shout out to my diesel heater and 5lb propane tank!).
Only I had the added benefit of potentially getting to wake up someplace new. If the neighbors fought or played obnoxious music all night, I could move. Also, I didn’t have to stick around for bad weather. Last year, I followed the autumn leaves from mid-September in Colorado, all the way until the middle of January in western Arizona. I saw giant trees and desert palms. I fell asleep to the sound of raging surf near a sea cliff.
My biggest stressor is budgeting for gasoline, followed by finding a place to park for a few days where I won’t get “the knock.”
Comfort Zones
I have been parked in my hometown for the last four months. My first voyage basically ended at the end of May. I came home to do some maintenance on the bus, spend time with my folks, have a yard sale, and to do lots of work for my main client. I was incredibly busy, covering everything from Rodeo to ultramarathons, street fairs, and everything going on during the summer. I sold a few stories this summer too!
It felt good to get things done, but I missed being on the road.
I had gotten comfortable with my daily routine. Waking up. Making coffee and oatmeal. Enjoying quiet mornings and later throwing the ball for Penny. Then I could write without interruption. Maybe get in a nap, eat a late lunch, take some photographs, visit a town, answer some emails or send out some pitches if I had signal.
At my folks, the schedule was a little more monotonous. Wake up. Eat. Shower and get ready. Doomscroll. Eat. Nap. Doomscroll. Eat. Nap. Watch my dog (and myself) get fatter and fatter. Scrolling scrolling scrolling and then fall asleep.
I felt like I was always yearning for that life of continuous motion. New places. New challenges. Instead I was eating dinner at four in the afternoon and looking forward to my evening snack. Feeling lonely when I fell asleep. I could feel my arteries hardening.
Doomscrolling took its toll so much that I couldn’t sleep without it. I couldn’t get motivated to work without a constant fix of instant gratification social media. If the first year of life on the road was about figuring out how to do it, I want the second year to be about getting healthy.
Second Voyage Itinerary
Here’s what I’ve got planned so far:
- Less internet and more reading actual books and articles
- Eat healthier
- Keep my body moving
- Work smarter
- Play fetch more with Penny
- Get in better touch with my soul
For work, I want to knock it out of the park with my client, and possibly take on one or two more. I always want to be improving and earning those checks, but I think I’m also ready to really take on my own personal projects.
- The Podcast
- The YouTube channel
- My substack newsletter
- Blogging
- Working on my book!
There’s only one thing holding me back from doing all of those, and that is fear. Fear of all the hard work I’ll put into it, fear of the vulnerability of putting my heart into these things, and fear that in spite of all of this, nobody will care (so what’s the point?) Fear of getting out of my comfort zone. Fear that my enemies will just laugh at me.
Just remember, if you have enemies that means you’ve probably done something in your life.
I’m no longer young and beautiful. I’m not rich enough to do the dazzling trips and get the clicks and likes and all of that bullshit to capture the hearts and minds of the Algorithm. But maybe if there’s more people out there like me who are curious about this choice I’ve made—and maybe are considering it themselves—I don’t mind helping them out.
This morning I woke up to a blue sky. Yellow and red leaves on 14,000ft peaks. I made coffee and oatmeal. And I was home again.