Maybe I’ll live in a van
All aboard a train of thought.
I work remotely. My husband has a schedule that gives him weeks at a time off. I hate living in Texas, and doubly so in the summer.
Everywhere we visit is more pleasant than where we live. But we can’t afford to move to most of them, and each of them have downsides that can’t be ignored.
Maybe I should live in a van.
Maybe not a van. An RV. A travel trailer, or a fifth wheel. I’ll sell almost everything I own. It’d be nice to have a king bed, and a desk area to work from.
We could explore the country. We could escape the heat in the summer and go somewhere beautiful in the winter. I could live the dream and do my day job and still pursue photography.
We could have a home base where my husband works and then we wouldn’t have to go weeks without seeing each other. He could come home every night because home could come to him.
Of course, there’s no real reason to keep the house in that case. If we sell the house, we could put the money into savings and not have to make payments for the RV.
Maybe we’ll hate it, though.
And I really like our house. I wish it were larger, and I wish it were located somewhere else. Somewhere more temperate and less concrete. But I’d hate to sell it and then wish we had it back.
And life on the road with no home base might be exhausting. We might miss being near our families.
Maybe we’ll keep the house.
Just for a little while. Until we understand if living on the road would make us happy. But in that case, we should get something smaller to test it out. Something we can tow with the truck we have.
It won’t have a lot of the features of a larger trailer. It’ll be harder to go out for weeks at a time.
And if I want to go out on my own, I’ll have to drive the truck with another 20+ feet hanging off the back. That sounds difficult.
Maybe we should start by just renting one.
And hey, we might really like it! The dog becomes exuberant in the snow, and we hardly ever get any in Texas anymore. We could take him to places he’d love.
We could tour the country and find a place we like enough to choose to settle down in. We could try things on for size until something fits, and then be confident in our choice to move there because we’d seen so many other options.
We could buy some land there and park the RV. We could stay in it while we build the house and then use it as a guest house when folks come to visit.
That sounds kind of nice, actually.
Maybe I’ll live in a van.
I have so many of these same conversations with myself. I really like the idea of stripping down to the basics and being a nomad in an RV.
The Texas part… I’m a native Texan and it’s changed so much for the worse. My wife and I also are privileged to travel much. Every time we do I run through these scenarios like you. I say if your husband is on board, do it!