1,000 Nights

If my addition and subtraction is correct, and my long-term memory is still sort-of reliable, tonight will mark the 1,000th night I've slept in the bus-house. Dar is 9 days behind me because of a couple trips she made back to Wisconsin.

A couple points come to mind at this milepost. First, (and I know this is an over-used phrase) time passes so quickly. Both of us are just ecstatic about the turn of events, the guts, and the little bit of luck that made this lifestyle possible for us. We can't think of anything we'd rather be doing right now. And while 1,000 nights sounds like a long time, it feels like we just began a few months ago. And neither of us feel like we've even scratched the surface of things to see and places to explore in the USA and North America.

One of these years we're going to spend the summer in Alaska. We haven't been to New England or the Northeast at all. Utah and Colorado are calling, as is the vast Midwest full of friendly small towns and loaded with history. There's much more to experience in our favorite Northwest. And then there's Canada, the Maritime Provinces, Vancouver Island, the Canadian Rockies. And on and on.

And just what do we get out of it all? It's much more than sight-seeing... it's "living" in these diverse places. It's meeting people, going to the grocery store, local cafes and saloons, learning the history, the cares and concerns and issues of the people. There's a comfort and familiarity that replaces uncertainty or fear of the unknown. You see and understand that people are people everywhere, and that they're mostly approachable and kind and good-natured if given the chance.

The second point is that it's much easier to live in a small space than I thought. Surely, a necessary condition of this is a compatible easy-going partner. But if you've got that I'm now convinced it'd be easy to live in even less space than we have now. If you've got the right traveling mate you can live this lifestyle just fine in a hundred square feet. If you don't have the right traveling mate, a thousand square feet isn't going to be large enough.

Since you spend almost a third of your life in bed, it is important to have a great bed. For us, our full queen-size Tempurpedic mattress is our refuge from any discomfort that may creep into our lives during the day. We've been sleeping on a Tempurpedic for many years and, for us, it's the best.

Living and exploring fulltime in an RV is a series of compromises. A big-rig RV provides the ability to bring along more toys, stuff, and creature comforts... but it limits where you can go. The next phase of our life on the road, based on the way we live and what we like to do, will be to downsize  so we can camp and explore more primitive and off-the-beaten-path areas. But that's some distance in the future and until that time we're cool with what we've got... for at least the next 1,000 nights.

Pondering the possibilities...
Thom