Welcome to Our Crazy/Brave Adventure!

January 7th, 2022

Let’s start with a declaration: We are moving on! 

I am a month out from 55 years old, Dan is 61. We spent our 20s (and some of our 30s) trying stuff out: graduate school, work,  and travels. Then settled down for our 40s and 50s, raising our three children… (trying to) manage a farm and (trying to) pay our hefty mortgage with an assortment of part time and full time teaching jobs. It was hard– sometimes crushingly so– and yet I wouldn’t give up any of it.

Fast forwards several years:

The kids are grown. The farm is reduced to two aging dogs. The mortgage is reduced to a somewhat more manageable sum. The pandemic has given us time to consider, a little more deeply, what we desire for this next phase.  My beloved Auntie Jill, who died during COVID times, used to say that, like a snake, I’d shuck off my skin every few years and become a whole new person with new interests and pursuits. This feels pretty true to me. Of course I am still “me”, an incurable introvert, dreamy and self contained, with frustratingly consistent bad habits. But this current skin is getting a little itchy.

And over the last few years, while I have been teaching and daytripping and and housekeeping,  part of me has been whispering “What’s next? What’s next?”  

Dan and I have longed for an unconventional life almost as long as we have lived a (relatively) conventional one, but even more imperative was the need to provide a stable, secure home and community for our kids. They are grown now, and the old longing is more insistent. If I were to be honest, it is pretty well all-encompassing lately. 

I don’t want to grow old and set in my ways here in my house. I don’t want to wish I had realized a few of my wilder dreams…… but didn’t. Now that the kids are more independent, our “have tos” have loosened up,  and we can dream a new way of being into being.

We are going to build out a no-frills, low-top Ford Econoline van on a budget and take off on an indefinite adventure. We will boondock as much as we can manage, drive as many dusty, rugged roads as the van can take, hike and rockhound and adventure in all sorts of ways… while Dan works remotely at his current job and I, Perri, learn some new ways of working to supplement our income and (hopefully) keep us afloat.

Or at least that is the general plan. 

There are a lot of unknowns. Dan and I hold our hope more more tightly than any firm idea of the future. We are at least six months away from our dream and I worry that putting these thoughts down on paper might cause them to evaporate. Are they strong enough to hold their own on this blank white google doc? I hope think so. 

In this journal: 

I will try to be honest with myself, to present our challenges as they are, not as some idealized “van life” dream. (Though of course I will share those too.) In any lifestyle there are moments of routine and minutiae, days we miss the mark and days we do little more than fret, watch bad TV and play too many games of iPad scrabble. But there are also moments of joy and contentment. 

I am hoping to use this blog to capture the range of our “van life” experience, along with providing more practical  resources about places to visit and how to manage the details of life on the road.  This journal isn’t about “monetizing” your clicks and views –though I may post about strategies to develop remote income (if I figure that out!)  It is about documenting and sharing what we learn and experience as we move off in a new direction, living and working on the road.   

Welcome to our Crazy/Brave Adventure! We’d love to have you  along for the ride!