I Love Getting Questions….

I really do enjoy responding to questions about this lifestyle. I am totally aware that is not for everyone. And for  most people, it’s not even normal — LOL. But many are curious. Here’s part two of what I started earlier this month.

What about money? 

I get lots of questions about the cost of my lifestyle. I am not comfortable giving specifics, so I’ve been struggling with how to communicate it. I have the plan and will put it in the next post.

How do you cook/What do you eat? 

I don’t eat much differently now than I used to when I had a house and went to a job every day. A little yogurt and fruit or cereal for breakfast, maybe a sandwich or salad for lunch, and a light dinner. Coffee in the morning, always.

The biggest difference from my camper van and a house is I don’t have a real oven — I miss that. But I DO have a convection microwave. I recently attended a little class on how to use it, so I hope to expand my eating choices. I have a little outdoor propane stove and a couple iron skillets that I’ve also been using. I chose the stove over a portable grill, as I thought I’d get more use out of it.

I also have a two-burner stove inside the camper.

I don’t eat out much, but one of the things that I love about this lifestyle is visiting local restaurants, generally on a travel day.

Unless it’s a rare occasion, my practice is to make a “lunch out” yield three servings – one in the restaurant, and two meals of leftovers. I love leftovers, and I don’t mind eating the same thing on consecutive days, so that works.  When it works out with the travel schedule (and my travel schedules are generally very, very fluid), I like to go at downtimes. Say at 2:00 pm for lunch – the servers are usually not busy and I can typically chat them up a bit.

Do you get lonely”?

Yes, sometimes I do. You had a hint to the answer when I mentioned above that I schedule my eating out times for when I can chat with the servers  :-).

I am pretty comfortable being alone, but I often miss camaraderie – sharing a meal, laughing with a friend or two. It usually is most apparent at dinner time, when my camping neighbors are gathering for the family/friend meal.

Staying active on social media/texts helps me to stay connected. One of my favorite things is to text to a friend a photo of some unusual thing I am seeing in my travels, accompanied by a smart-aleck message – and bless those friends that engage in and respond to my smart-aleckng ways.

Also, being out and about with two active dogs invites conversation and means that I am more likely to meet new people who are interesting and whom I would never in a million years meet otherwise. Two examples below…

At my last campground, I met a fellow camper who, in the first two minutes of our conversation, and without appearing to be at all obnoxious, described the girth of one of the body parts of his son’s dog — quite graphically. WTH?  There’s lots of commentary to be made on that – all of which I will forgo. It was not embarrassing and was barely awkward — but WAS memorable.

And last month in Libby, Montana, a man doing his laundry in the campground laundromat shared with me that his wife of 60-some years had died in February AND the day before our chat he had hit a deer with his RV while returning from a solo trip to Maine where he had  spread her ashes – doing serious damage to the RV.  Even with all that, he had an incredibly optimistic outlook.

It’s hard to stay too lonely when you run into these slices of life on a near-daily basis.

I will say that I think the beautiful locations that  I am visiting would be richer if I traveled with someone that I love to share them with. Alternatively, though, I think I have richer experiences with the people that I meet because I am meeting them by myself. I can be fully engaged in the conversation. It’s all a trade-off, ain’t it?

What does the future hold?

I really don’t know. We are still having a blast in this vagabond lifestyle. As we get into our second year, we are tending to stay a little longer in each given place.  That’s a development that I was expecting – the first year can be kind of a frantic travel pace. Sometime in the future I would like to have a part-time home base of some sort, but I’m not sure yet what that would look like.

What I will add is how fortunate we are to be able to live this life at this time. Somebody recently asked if I would want to try to add in some international travel – like to Europe. My response was pretty swift. I love traveling over the road. There are too many locations in the USA, Canada, and Mexico for me to travel to before I consider air travel to other locations — not that I know what they are yet! :-)

I thank you all for your attention to this blog. I love to read your comments – in fact, I get a little tingle when I get an alert that there has been a comment.  Please feel free to post any questions here. I’ll do my best to respond to them.