Proof
A year on the road and the only things I miss have stories attached
Wibbly wobbly timey wimey — let’s all close our eyes and picture July last year — it’s summer, it’s hot, and most people are busy dreaming about their summer vacation. Not me — I’m busy packing and planning for a move. But not just any move, the last real move anyone might count it as being. The townhouse is packed into boxes, the storage unit is paid for and waiting, the movers are here working like ants getting everything in the truck. It’s a lot to coordinate this time, getting the house packed up and into the unit but also getting me and my five bags to the airport on time. Cause this move isn’t to another place in the same city, or even to a neighboring state — it’s dumping everything we own into the unit and hitting the road to start traveling full-time housesitting.
We made it, but I left before my partner finished stuffing things in storage and that was a trip. Just hearing about it and having to wait almost six months to see how everything got left behind. But we did it — July we packed up our lives and by August we had hit the road, sit after sit, city after city, pet after pet. We not only started this crazy journey but we flourished.
Finding ourselves in new houses over and over and with new pets each time became so much easier than we thought. I’m literally writing this on the treadmill at our Salt Lake City host’s and didn’t even blink about using all they offered to us. And my partner has really settled into things too — making friends and walking the dogs, helping maintain the house bits I know nothing about, and still struggling to manage dishes and laundry like we did in our own places.
Thinking back to the storage unit happened occasionally, and much less as the year went on. The only things back there that kept calling to me were my books — I miss my library and the feel of a paperback in my hands during a reading binge. But books are so hard to travel with so I’ve had to make do with digital books. A learning curve not only in software but also in how I fall into a book — no smell, no texture, it really makes the story work harder to keep me in the world.
And the most specific bit left behind I think is my bar collection — all the bottles of alcohol collected over our travels, small signs of somewhere we’ve been and an experience within that of going to that distillery or winery and exploring and sampling and rendering that moment in time as a bottle of something. If traveling with books is hard, I’ve learned traveling with alcohol is near impossible. I’ve had too many bottles explode and lose their seal from heat exposure in the Southwest, and risked too many bottles on airplanes to ever contemplate collecting liquor as anything more than something to consume at a specific location — making my travel souvenirs more portable, like stickers and postcards.
This past year has been an adventure so unable to be defined by scope it’s almost impossible to write all the details about what happened down. So many spurs to run down, so many bumps we overcame, so much we learned.
Funnily enough though, I think the biggest lesson is still being instilled into us. We’ve spent the past year on the road in North America driving mostly to all these places and now in the past few months all we can talk about is well, what next — could we live out of an RV and travel even further off grid — could we live on a boat and see all these coastal towns — well, what about Europe, could we live in Spain for a year and really learn to live like locals somewhere totally foreign.
Our dreams have grown with our experience and now the challenge isn’t living without a permanent address, it’s how do we live even bigger than that. Everyone tells you to dream big as the sky, so we did, and now we’re there. So next, we’re looking at the stars and mapping out how to reach them.