Have you ever decided to reinvent your life, and then commit to repeating the process every six months? Stop reading for a second and look around. Who are you? How much of "you" is your possessions and the places they sit? How important is the cocoon of community that subtly surrounds you from the clerk at the cleaners, to the pew you sit in at church, to the parks your child played in, to the roads you know by heart. Will you keep your friends if you "move away" and the contact becomes electronic rather than face to face? Can you be accepted and create community if you only stay in a place for six months? Those are some of the myriad of questions that I'm trying to answer as Drake and I start our vagabonding plan.
It all began two years ago. We had just retired, Drake by choice and I by force. We had fulfilled one of Drake's mosted cherished "when I retire" dreams by attending Spring Training for the Texas Rangers in Arizona. We were winding up a 30 day road trip, and neither one of us was eager to pick up our real life again. Now, driving across West Texas is like having a cavity filled - necessary, but not something you'd choose to do. I lazily asked the question, "Why can't be travel like this more often?" Drake's laconic reply, "We can't afford the $100 price to have a bed and pillow each night we are gone from home." I'm sure you can guess my next question: "Well, why do we have to have a 2100 square foot house in Hurst, Texas?"
That was the key question. We both thought about the time it takes to maintain our home. We clean it, repair it, paint it, decorate it, rake the leaves, cut the grass, and on and on. Those are just major categories. If you just break down "clean it" - I'm talking about vacuuming, floor mopping 1100 square feet of tile, carpet shampooing the other 1000 feet, cleaning 2.5 bathrooms, dusting all the furniture, window washing, kitchen cleaning........... You get the picture, and my housekeeping efforts could be charitably described as grudging and minimalist. It slowly sank in that we were spending an inordinate amount of time maintaining our possessions. Why were we doing this? We really couldn't come up with compelling reasons other than "it's our home" and "it's a habit".
Once you break the bond of needing a home, then lots of possibilities open up. We thought about and quickly discarded the "motor home lifestyle". We both agreed that just putting your possessions on your back, living in an area the size of a big hotel room, and still having to spend time and effort in maintenance wasn't for us. Those motor homes, travel trailers, 5th wheelers, and buses don't have fairies to keep them functioning, and they are so big that you really can't "go anywhere" when you have one. (Actually, we did run into a couple who lived in a motor home the size of a camper on the back of a truck. It looked really nice and REALLY SMALL.) However, I digress.
We hatched the plan on the high plains. The question became, "Where do we want to go?" The answer was, "Everywhere we've ever wanted to see, or anywhere we want to go back to where we felt like we just scratched the surface in a 2 week vacation." We came home with a fully formed idea. What would it be like to live in a different location around the country every six months taking with us only what we could load into a 6x10 trailer which we would pull to each new location with our car. We called the idea vagabonding. For the record, vagabond means moving from place to place without a fixed home.
This idea unlike many off the wall, out of the box, thoughts was initially exciting to contemplate and kept getting more exciting as we hashed it out driving across the vastness of the Llano Estacado. (For you non-Texans, that's the old time Spanish term for West Texas - it means 'staked plain'. That is what the early Spanish explorers did. They drove stakes each one visible from the last since the terrain had no distinguishable landmarks as navigation aids. Why in God's name anyone would want to explore West Texas remains beyond me, but, hey, the Spanish were a greedy lot, and they thought they might find some gold they could steal.)
Back to the plan. The internet is making the vagabonding plan a reality. We pay our bills on-line, and most of our bills are now paperless. We bank at a national bank with branches everywhere. We can pick a location (Charlottesvilla, Virginia, for instance) and survey apartment rents, cost of living, climate, geography, attractions, and a host of other things because of the internet. There's even an internet mail service that collects your mail, filters it, and send on to you the important stuff - It's an electronic post office box. And...........you don't have to kiss your friends goodbye knowing that slowly but surely due to lack of contact and interaction, those friendships will dwindle to an annual Christmas card. Cell phones now let your carry your phone number with you everywhere and all your friends' phone numbers. That expensive, sparingly used means of contact the long distance telephone call is now a dodo bird in terms of today's phone technology. Don't even let me get started on email and blogs.
The computer lets you share your thoughts, write a book, send pictures, and record your fears and triumphs with your friends. It will map the routes to new grocery stores and the shoe repair shop easing that "Oh my God, I'm lost" feeling in the new locale. Computer searches allow you to winnow choices without ever having to leave your desk. This is all utterly amazing to me since I remember life before electronic technology. Vagabonding would not have been possible 10 years ago.
So, this is going to be easy, right? Well, no, not exactly. We had to postpone the implementation due to family crisis. That has turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we've had time to ponder what this vagabond idea will really mean. We've had time to refine the concept. and the concept just isn't going away as some crackpot idea we dreamed up to pass the time driving across West Texas.
In the past six months it's gotten real. As it sinks in that we will really be leaving the home and community we have known for 20 years, issues have begun to arise that we didn't give much weight to two years ago. How much storage space are we going to need? What do we sell? What do we keep? What do we take? Where are we going? There will be lots of negotions and decisions involving a shared life of 40 years.
I suppose this journal, blog, book, whatever it turns out to be will be a reflection on just what I started with: How important are my possessions and the place I reside? How much do I need a carefully built up and interconnected community? What do I really want for the next five years? What will make me happy? How important is routine? Will moving every six months become a staggering chore, or will each time be an exciting adventure. I think we are going to find out.
