minimalist – Page 7 – Two Travelin' Chicas…

Wilderness Travelers: Part One

Life Off Grid

Life on the road is not a vacation. You are not going home. You are home. You didn’t skirt any chores, honey-do fix it project, or little things that need to be done, because there’s always something to fix on the van, and it’s sometimes harder on the road.

Living off grid is a wonderful adventure if you have the right state of mind, as my grandparents used to say,”got enough gumption.” Where ever you land is where you call home. Some places feel like a place you’d like to stay and experience all it’s energy. Others are just quick over nights.

I think that life in the wilderness affords you a certain peace of mind, softens the heart, and gives you a connection to the earth. You live with the flies, the mosquitos, the ants and mice. You’re in their home as a visitor. You live sometimes on dusty roads with the humidity just right, and the air just still enough, that the dust hangs like a heavy cloud, suffocating all manor of life, including you. Other times you’ll live on a desert plateau or a beach, or a mountain riverside. Each pallet a different experience. Each is your little place in the world at that second. Your footprint is very small.

You may meet people here and there. Each with their own story to tell. Each exist in their struggle to belong, to find something they think is missing. Out on the road there’s only you to deal with (except in a COVID-19 pandemic). With COVID, anyone you meet and even the air you breathe can make you sick. In general most people are kind and courteous, following the rules. We are all on the same path to be calm and stay healthy.

I have a certain affinity for trees, perhaps I was a squirrel once. The taller the better. These enduring sentinels hold years upon years of memories of season upon season. In the Wild I connect to everything animate and inanimate. The depth of the silence, the rivers voice heard loud and clear and echoing through the canyons. The peel of a bird of preys call. This is a place of magic and whimsy.

You need only 4 things when vagabonding… food, a clean source of water, gas (petrol and LPG) and a safe place to park. We prefer places away from people but this isn’t always possible. So you bend and accept whatever accommodations you can for that night. We are always able to move in the morning to a more suitable place to call home. Everything is fluid.

This is Our New Home

The vast sky looming above

The clouds drift by in heavy formations

Billowing to the top of the sky in endless flowing and changing shapes

The birds sing their joy

Tiny babes can be heard calling mother back to the nest

The sound of water as it meanders down the creek bed

Bubbling over the rocks

Sneaking beneath overhangs where fish sit poised for the next meal

The aspens still waking from a cold winter

Have the tiniest almost translucent pale green leaves

The subAlpines and black pines soar like silent sentinels above the sage

Whole fields of deep green dotted with brilliant yellow flowers for as far as the eye can see blanket hillsides

This is our new home

Travelers of both time and space

No longer slave to the clock

A sanctuary made by Mother Nature

Observed in silence and reverence

Existing as the flow of the river

As invisible as the wind

Setting and rising like the moon

This is our new home

In Search Of…

My mind spins in wonder

My heart… full of joy

My eyes see the beauty around me

The vibration of the earth

Becomes a harmony in my body

Molecules and atoms split

Exploding into new life

I am… at ease

We are unified

In search of a peaceful existence in this world

Life off grid… connecting with nature

Talking with trees

Consoled by the rivers

Held in warmth by the sun

In search of wisdom from the moon

Soaring through the hawks eyes on the thermals

In search of life.

Fragility

I walk upon the desert floor

Red sands of ancient seashores and reefs

White sands blend into grey

Walls of stone and sand

Carved over millions of years.

Thrust up and sculpted by the wind and rain

Back on the ground

The fragile Indian rice

Mother nature’s doilie

Delicate as it shimmers in the afternoon sun

The columbine show their salmon colors on a ridged green stalk

The cactus protect their lacy blooms with great thorns

The sages of all kind sway in their early soft grey and green fronds

The smell of sage heavy in the hot air rising from the red path beneath my feet

A delicate balance

A fragility of life in a harsh yet beautiful environment

What does it feel like to be alone?

In the wilderness, it’s being the only two humans around. Nothing but the sound of your heart beat in the silence. Your breath. Then the wind far off as it rushes through the willows and the trees that line the river in a wave until it reaches me. The green turns to silver as it brushes over the tops of the willows and grasses. The smooth surface of the water becomes disturbed and shivers as the wind touches it. A fish jumps. A shrill chirp of a bird. The sound of the air cut by the wing of a passing bird. The sound of the hollow rattle of the wood pecker. To be able hear your thoughts and watch them pass as they find no ground in your quiet still mind. Chris stands still out among the elusive trout in the river. Her line shimmers in the early morning sun light. Gandaulf sits…barely tall enough to be seen waiting for her to catch a fish.

To be alone is not to be lonely but to become one with all that lives and breathes around you without having to say a word. You, inside your own self yet cognitively aware of all that’s around you. To be separate from the thoughts of others…not influenced, you, yourself. Lack of stress. Living in the moment. Allowing a silent tear when you think of the others you love and how they suffer. Alone with the vibration of all that’s around you.

Alone at 9400 ft. Amazing, peaceful, alarming, silent yet very loud, small, powerful, beauty beyond words only felt. Clear air, clean water, bright sunshine, starry skies, incredible moon! Timeless, unstructured, fun, meditative, no cell phone, internet, Pandora, XM, only the song that rattles around in your head all day – the mantra. FULL! JA

In The End… There is a Beginning

It’s taken years and years of planning, building and selling off everything we have owned. Our house, our car, our possessions… short of a 2015 Ford Transit T250 cargo van. The plan was to convert the van into our tiny home on the road.

We started planning in 2015. The list seemed unsurmountable. First off, we owned a thriving car dealership, a house on the hill, plenty of “stuff” collected over the years. All of our worldly possessions had to be slowly released and sold off. Items were given away to anyone who needed our “stuff.”

Chris and I have been together for nearly thirty years and have accumulated items from our travels around the world, all needed to go. The memories, trinkets, art work, all needed to find new homes. It was, at times, incredibly hard to release items that held memories of an incredible time away in another culture. Some we met the artist, some were bought off the street, from a blanket spread out on the sidewalk. Some bartered for something we owned in return. In a way each told a story that only Chris and I will remember.

As far as financing such an undertaking? Like I said earlier, we owned a business, a house and tons of stuff. Next we had been stashing away the maximum possible in our 401k for the last 25 years or so. Properly invested, it has become a nice nest-egg for funding the remainder of our lives. We sold the car dealership in March 2020 and our home in November 2019. With the proceeds from theses sales we were set.

We procured the van in November of 2018. It was a super high top, shorty, with single rear wheels. It seemed like a daunting task to imagine building this empty shell into a someday home. It was quite cavernous, stark white, bare walls, a stinking rubber insulated mat that has soaked up years of landscape smells, no windows except for the two back doors. My imagination was reeling, the cogs began to put a bed here and a cabinet there. I thought about how much I didn’t know about solar, electrical wiring, plumbing, carpentry and running propane lines. Building the van was going to be an adventure in itself.

We started small with searching the internet for build blogs. Vanlife is a real thing!

Life on the Road

It’s no small task to take off on a road trip of a lifetime. To become a traveler of both time and space. Exploring anything that catches our eye. Going with the weather, eventually heading North and cutting the umbilical cord from our life of 28 years. This of course means I need to get a good handle on my tribe and understand and work with Chris and Tracy to keep me in line if I should loose focus. It’s tiring to stay so focused, but I know it’s what I got to do.

Gandaulf is enjoying life on the road… or he just loves being with his moms all the time. Either way he is comfortable in the van and that’s a good thing. He has his own memory foam seat between us and is able to see out the windows. He is starting to even learn to sleep while driving. He’s such a good boy and everyone loves him.

WE did this 27 yrs ago. Sold everything we owned, and hit the road. Back then it was a silly dream, early middle age crisis… a healing journey that solidified our relationship. We both are at home in nature, be it mountains, deserts, beaches not so much big cities. This is a journey with no real destination. A healing vagabond journey. A wondering yogi. Two lost souls looking to release, relax and reconnect.

No…Not what you think

We decided to take this trip to Tucson…just because we’d never been there. We love the desert but Tucson just seemed like some far off retirement community. A dry desert town of little means but rich in Native American, Anglo and Mexican history. Why not?

We just got back from Nicaragua a few weeks ago and we are both already burnt out. The house we are renting has sold and we have 2 weeks to move. At this point I’m glad to be a minimalist.

We’ve submitted an application for a short term lease in a place where we can work on finishing the van and say our see ya laters and hit the road. A month or so to travel across the lower states getting used to the van and each other. This is actually where we melt together and enter into our element. Life from this point on will be fluid.

So back to Tucson, forgive my ADHD… We rented this cute 4 star eclectic hotel to camp out for the next few days. Great reviews. Earthy crunchy whole wheat little place. I admit when we first pulled in a part of me was not feeling it. I calmed down and thought how unfair that we would not even keep an open mind.

Hotel McCoy even racks my brain for appropriate words to describe it. Take it at face value, you’ll drive right on through the parking lot. Look deeper, take time to walk around…slowly. The artists that created this space left a piece of their heart behind on these walls. It speaks to the seeker in this land of saguaros and deadly critters. Grabs your mind and swirls it around leaving you spinning in your thoughts.

A Long Time Coming

It’s hard to tell a story with so many twists and turns. Sometimes the anticipation and planning is more stressful than anything I’ve done before. It’s different when it’s a long term decision. The path we choose now WILL affect the next phase of our lives. Saying that out loud really brings this into perspective. The decisions we have made in the past could be wrong… we always had the time and means to make it right. This decision may not be so easy to undo.

What on earth could be so dire? Well it’s the decision about our new home on wheels.

So you may be saying, so what’s the big deal?

When you are going from a house too big for two, to a custom created camper van with a living space of 73.5 square feet. Everything you own is contained in this space. How do you decide what to keep and what to discard? We grew up in a time when at least 40 years of our lives were NOT digital. That means for a photographer… boxes and boxes of prints and negatives. I have a wood toy chest from my childhood I have lugged all over the US every time I moved. Handwritten letters from past loves, friends and family. Artwork collected from around the world.

The electronics, furniture and other STUFF is easy to part with. There is just so much STUFF to get rid of…

The process: We have really vacillated back and forth between a very used Sprinter van to a gently used Ford Transit. My mind has been designing and redesigning our cozy living space. The main goal is usable space and storage. A space that two women and a corgi can live in comfortably. A “home on wheels” that is comfortable and inviting. Our Tiny Home.

There is so much I have had to learn. Solar, plumbing, electrical, wood working. The imagination is strong and the ability to recreate what I see may be tough. We hopefully will be buying our van this week and the build will begin. I hope we will be able to be patient and build out our space carefully and “hell for strong”, as my dad would say.

The Hurry Up and Wait Game

The hardest thing of all this moving on is the hurry up and wait game. I guess we did it to ourselves.

In the US, perhaps as with many other countries too, forgive my ignorance… we have to invest our money in a home in order to offset some tax burdens imposed on us. Same holds true with a business… pay yourself or pay the government.

Seventeen years ago we built our dream home. We had no intention of moving outside the US or traveling to the extent we are currently planning. If you had told me back then that we would amass a good amount of money, enough to live very well on, I would’ve laughed. Today this is very much a reality.

The biggest hang up is our business and building it works out of. I have no doubt that our home will sell quickly. The business is hit or miss. The building is also a major wildcard. Part of investing in our future has been making these investments. It is the time it takes to liquidate all these that is driving me crazy.

It is the hurry up and wait game that we are embroiled in currently. People inquire about the business, the building and what not. We answer these questions and nothing seems to ever materialize. The other day some “YouTube” guys came in and took a tour. They are looking for a studio to make their videos. Another guy came in and sat down in front of me until we had so much going on I had to excuse myself. Another guy has been texting and has a walk through and interview on Tuesday. I hope that in all this action some solid lead will come.

In the meantime we continue to move forward with decluttering years of possessions. The various pieces of local artwork from different countries where we have traveled all have to go. The nick knacks, furniture and household items we have accumulated must go. It is hard to put what worldly treasures you think you want to keep and someday be reunited with, in an assortment of manageable boxes.

What will life look like when we finally land and put downs some roots again? Will we be able to live on our own and be healthy? A deep down part of me fears growing old. Being alone someday. The life of a Gay Woman, a Vagabond, an Overlander, a World Traveler… all come with a price in the end. Growing old and alone. Hey… it’s reality. No kids, no family but those you’ve met on the road. No roots, no foundation but the means to buy whatever happiness you can… and even now that isn’t always a given unless you carry around pieces of gold.

So now… sitting in my backyard, surrounded by sounds of the birds in our little piece of forest. Somewhere in a small mountainside in Utah, my home, the simple greens of our oak trees and aspens are soothing that turmoil of fear. Life is here and now. Sometimes, yes we must settle with hurry up and wait.