Into the Green
Kara and I are working on something.
I haven't exactly kept it hush-hush, but I haven't really made any official announcements either. But the short of it is, Kara and I want to sell our house, buy a camper trailer, and travel the country for a couple of years. We really just want to explore the place end to end, and maybe figure out where we'd like to stop long term.
We're also thinking that after we've put wheels to every highway and backroad the interests us, we might want to park the camper and get on a plane and hop the pond. We'd like to spend some time exploring places a little further out than our road trips might have taken us.
It's not really that either of us have a particularly powerful wander lust. But we both have a love for stories. Kara loves history and digging deep into the loamy soil of old buildings and genealogy and historic locations. I have a thing for what I like to call "the Green"—all those lush and thriving places you see in computer desktop slideshows and as settings for fantasy movies. And we both like meeting new people and figuring out what they're all about.
As a novelist, this stuff is grist for the mill, but it's also just plain nourishment for my soul. The thought of stepping out of my front door and hurling myself into an adventure is pretty tempting. I wouldn't mind going all Bilbo Baggins.
The compromise is the camper, of course. We'll go on our particular adventure with all the comforts of home. Handy for having just a slight sense of stability and familiarity in our daily lives. Even handier for avoiding divorce. I'm pretty positive Kara would never come around to sleeping on the ground.
Maybe I wouldn't either.
Anyway, our adventure hasn't started quite yet. Not on a grand scale. It's started on a smaller scale, with little tasks taking up some of our time. We're starting to get the house ready to show. We're fixing the million little things that need tending to, and we're considering our options. We don't have a solid, set-in-stone plan just yet, but it's coming. I can smell it.
Scary? Oh yes. That's part of the appeal. It's scary and wonderful. It might be uncomfortable, too. It might be miserable. But I don't think it will be. I think we'll find ourselves driving through misery for a spell, but pulling up to camp for a time in we-love-it.
And I figure I'll document the whole thing. Here, on YouTube maybe, in a podcast (though I'm not sure which one yet). And books. Oh, there will be books. Maybe not about this experience directly, but you can bet that everything I encounter will go into the filter. It will color what I write, and it will appear for you in the form of one story or another and another and another.
We don't know for sure, yet, what will come up next. But our tentative plan is to get into a Prime Time Sanibel 3701 Residential. That's going to require trading in my Toyota Tundra for something that can pull a fifth wheel—a fact that saddens me but is something I can live with. I'm going to make a lot more sacrifices for the cause, by the time it's all said and done.
For starters, I've spent the past day trying to squeeze everything I do into a backpack. And it worked! Sorta. I'm getting there.
The podcast and my writing can all be boiled down to a few key pieces of equipment. Mostly, I need my MacBook Air and an internet connection. I have the H4n to stand in for the microphone and mixer I use in the podcast. It's not a perfect system, but I'm working out a lot of the challenges.
There's a lot more to figure out, and I can't wait to get to every bit of it!
I'm going to do my best to document this whole thing as we go. If there's anything in particular you'd like to know or would like to hear about, tell me and I'll see what I can pull together.
I'm pretty sure that I'll be writing about at least a few key topics in the future, including what I learn about mobile internet, how to keep fit while on the road (this is a goal Kara and I have, since we didn't manage to stay fit off the road), how to find entertainment that doesn't bust the budget every month, how to live large in a small space, etc.
Not every post you read in this blog is going to be about this, of course, but you can expect a lot of them well be. I'm just looking forward to exploring life as a writer on the road. And I figure you'll dig it, too.
See you out there.