At this very moment I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Cedar Park, Texas. I’m about 20 minutes from the site where Kara and I are building a house—the home we’re aiming to move into sometime over the next seven months. A long time to be patient, we’ve discovered. Especially since we’ve already been patient since November as it is.

We like Cedar Park. The area seems clean and safe, there’s a sort of calming energy to it. There’s a very “home” vibe here, already. House or no house.

This sort of thing really hit us when we rolled back into town after spending a couple of weeks in Waco and then Canton. We’ve been to Waco before—we’re fans of the Magnolia Market and everything Chip and Joanna Gaines are building. We like the industry and work ethic of those two. Waco, on the other hand… it’s not really for us.

Canton was nice. The people we encountered there were good and kind. The fact that everyone was there for one of the biggest flea markets on the planet surely helps. But when the trade days were over and we found ourselves winding down in a local RV park, struggling to get LTE signal so we could work, we decided it was time to move on. So we hoofed it back here.

And that’s when it happened.

It was almost the instant we rolled into familiar territory here. We passed a sign telling us where we were, and then spotted some landmarks we recognized, and that was it. We suddenly, strongly, felt at home.

We’ve felt that before.

On our way back to Texas, after spending a rough patch in Colorado Springs—temperatures below freezing, a bout of bronchitis, an “incident” with the black tank on the van—the instant we crossed the state line I felt my powers returning. Home. That was the feeling.

It happened again when we got to our old stomping grounds, around Sugar Land, Texas. I felt that boost of energy that only the familiar can provide. The feeling of being in a safer, warmer place. The feeling of being in a place where someone cares for and loves you.

Something, though, was changing.

Kara and I have lived around the Sugar Land area for years. It’s only about an hour north of where I grew up, and so everything within seventy miles feels like “home” to me. But before we’d gotten back to Sugar Land, Kara and I had already started looking for a place to live in the Cedar Park area. We landed in a new housing development in Liberty Hill, wedged between Cedar Park, Leander, and Georgetown. And we’d spent a few weeks driving around, exploring, staying in the occasional RV resort or extended stay hotel. We started to become familiar with our surroundings, and from there things started to feel like home. In fact, it started feeling more “home” than where I was raised.

And to me, that’s weird.

Humans are weird in general, really. Because our sense of “home” does shift and change depending on the context of our lives. We are adaptive and adaptable, when it comes to our living situation. We can transplant ourselves nearly anywhere and, with some nesting and acclimation, that place becomes home.

With one caveat.

One of the reasons Sugar Land has been “home” for us for so long is the fact that Kara’s family lives there, and my own family lives only about 45 minutes from there. The people we love were always in that area, and that was what made it home.

But a strange phenomenon is happening as the two of us consider new digs. Something I couldn’t quite have predicted.

First, Kara’s folks announced to us, while we were living full-time on the road, that they were “pulling a Kevin and Kara.” They’d taken a road trip to the Texas Hill Country, and had found a place they liked. So they’re building a house, selling their Sugar Land Home, and transplanting.

The reasons that’s a “Kevin and Kara” is because the two of us have always been pretty spontaneous about our living arrangements. We’ve lived in six rental properties, two “borrowed’ homes, one house we’ve purchased, and three RVs since we got married in 2006. And every one of those homes was something we decided, on a whim, to try out. We wouldn’t trade any of them for anything.

And we had, at one point, told Kara’s folks that we’d come to love the Texas Hill Country. We loved it so much, we thought we might come back around and find a place to live there. And, being us, it was a pretty fair bet that we’d do exactly that.

It must have inspired the two fo them, because they rolled right up to the hill country to find a place for themselves. And they told us all about it over one of our weekly video chats.

Once we learned that her folks were moving to the area, it shifted things a little. We were both getting tired of Sugar Land—and particularly of little things like hurricanes and flooding, threatening us for a few months out of every year. So knowing that we’d have family in the Hill Country now made it easier to just decide. We were going to find a place, and we were going to make the area home.

And then a surprise…

When my mother and brother heard we were moving to the area, they decided it would be a good move for them as well. My mother is getting close to retirement, and my brother has been looking for a change. This seemed like a good time time take a leap, to start fresh.

So, they’re looking for they’re looking to move here as well.

Suddenly, the largest chunk of my family was now going to live in a completely different part of the state. And once that happened… well… home shifted position.

This is still a weird thing, and I still haven’t pieced out what any of it means. But in my mind things have shifted the way you might movie a pin in one of those map apps. The little red divot used to point to Sugar Land and its surrounds, and now it’s pointing to Cedar Park. And the old area is now just “a place I’m familiar with.”

Home, though, is here.

Here… not just in a place that’s familiar, but with people I love. Here, where I can swing by to help my mom with something in her place. Here, where I can go play golf with my father-in-law. Here, where my brother can swing by to check in on our house while we’re off on a road trip.

These are the things you do when you are home. These are the elements that make a home. The location has changed, but it’s still home.

It’s weird because my family is coming with us to a new world, a new experience. For the past 15 years, Kara and I have always been kind of out on our own when it came to our adventures. But this time, everyone else is coming along, too.

Reflecting on this, thinking about what it means to be home, to feel at home, to think of a place as home, is changing a lot about my perspective. It’s making me rethink a lot of the assumptions of my life. I was already comfortable with the “home is where you park it” concept of RV living, but now I’m realizing that it can go deeper than that.

Because one day, all those people who are my home may be gone. People pass, leaving you behind. It’s happened to me a lot. There’s a sense of loss that comes with it. And that loss, I now realize, is that part of my home fading. The threads of connection between me and that person, in that place, in that time—they thin out. They don’t snap. They’re always there. But they become more memory than reality.

When those people who are home are gone, I’ll still, somehow, feel at home wherever I am. I’ll still feel a connection to the people and the place. I’ll form new threads of connection. I’ll become more familiar. I’ll become more at home.

And I’ll be home for someone else.

Weird, right?

When Kara and I envisioned van life, it was all about road trips. We loved the idea of having our home with us, having a way to use the restroom, prepare a meal, take a nap, watch some TV, get a good night’s sleep—just somewhere other than where we always were. It’s been like that for about a month now, honestly. In fact, we’re two days shy of a month in the van. 

But we’re still in Houston.

So that was not something we envisioned. In fact, being in Houston in the Summer was something we were adamantly opposed to. If you’ve never been here, the breakdown is it’s hot, it’s humid, it’s twice as hot and humid as you were probably just imagining, and the closer you get to Houston, proper, the more allergy and lung issues you tend to have. Also, super more hot and humid than you’re imagining. 

The thought of weathering that heat and humidity in the travel trailer was bad enough, but doing it in the van seemed like a nightmare. And, to be honest, combatting those conditions has been a challenge. Our AC has run non-stop, and it’s proven inadequate to keeping things “crispy cool.” We end up having to idle the engine and run the in-dash AC for a couple of hours each day, to keep things below the high 80s to 90s.

We’re working on some solutions—like reflective screens for the windows. But that just means carrying something that takes up more space, requires more setup and breakdown, and blocks our view of the outside.

Or... we could go someplace where we can actually be outside without bursting into flames a la Dracula on beach day. 

We’ll get there. We’re just having to spend some time in Houston for a bit longer, get a few more doctor visits done, get a few more packages delivered, get a few more items moved in and/or out of storage.

That’s been an interesting and (admittedly) fun challenge: Getting things right.

For the most part, the van has everything we need. All our basic needs can be met, as long as we keep the reserve tank full of water and some food in the fridge. But as with society and culture as a whole, in our microcosm of existence, once you’ve met basic needs it’s time to start tinkering to increase the comfort, utility, and aesthetics of your environment. 

So for the past month, Kara and I have made some upgrades and tweaks. For example, we got foam mattresses with down toppers to go on top of the stiff cushions that came with the van. We’ve bought nice-looking quilts that add some color and visual interest, while also adding to our sleep comfort. We had the stiff back cushions that came with the van cut down so that they were narrower, and therefore not blocking our walking path as much (BONUS: I can also use one as a lap desk while I’m sitting on my bed).

To give us a little more fridge space, we bought a 12-volt-powered cooler fridge where we keep drinks and other items. It can be used as either a fridge or a freezer, and we have it hovering a little between the two. That’s handy, but it also doubles as a bench where I can sit and pull on socks and shoes in the morning. 

When we were in the travel trailer, we had two little USB fans that worked great, and stayed at our bedside. In the van, they’ve been a little more challenging to use. We don’t have “bedsides” anymore. But I was able to find two battery powered, USB-charged fans that have flexible tripods, allowing us to put them anywhere—even hang them from the cabinets above us so we can have a little more airflow during the day.

The van came with window coverings for the front, but they were bulky and didn’t help keep the heat out much. So I ordered a set of Heatshield reflective shades, custom fit for the Ford Transit. Those have made a huge difference, especially when combined with the existing screens. 

We’ve made some improvements outside the van as well. Since there’s no under-carriage storage, the way there has been in our previous RVs, we bought a StowAway hitch-mounted “trunk” to keep our camp chairs, outdoor stove, and hoses and power cables in. It’s worked out perfectly, especially with little wheel-hub organizers I have for our cables and hoses. 

But the thing I’m most proud of, outside the van, is that I installed quick-disconnects on the water inlet valves. In fact, if it involves water, going in or out of the coach, I have a quick-connect adapter on it. Thanks to this I’m able to set up or break down the whole thing in a few minutes—very handy for van life. We can go from over-nighting at an RV park to being on the road in under 10 minutes. Under 5 if I don’t have to refill the water reserves or empty the black and grey tanks. 

These modifications have been fun. They’re the kind of thing I seem to enjoy most about this lifestyle. I like thinking about ways to improve something, and then improving it. I’m carrying some basic tools with me—hand tools like a hammer, wrenches, sockets, pliers, screwdrivers, but also a battery-powered drill and saw. And, of course, my Swiss Army knife, the ultimate go-to tool. And with all of these, as compact as they are, I can do many things.

The key is to be able to think in terms of repurposing and using whatever you have to solve whatever problem comes up. I’m pretty handy, and can fix practically anything. My engineering background comes out, from time to time. But anyone can do this, if they’re willing to rethinking what they have and how it can be used. 

I used to love those little thought experiments where someone would give you and object and you had to think of as many ways to use it, aside from its intended purpose, as you possibly could, in just a few minutes. I still do that sort of thing on my own today. You should try it—it’s a great way to sharpen your creative problem solving skills.

As we move deeper into van life, I can already see that there will be challenges and issues and problems. It’s the nature of the thing. We live in a house that suffers a 5.0 earthquake every time we get on the road—stuff happens. And there will certainly be problems I can’t solve on my own, or can’t solve immediately. It’s the way it is.

But what I love most about van life is not only the challenge of solving those problems, but also the challenge of finding new and better ways to do things. I love having to think about everything I have with me—how many ways can it be used? Do I have something that could serve these two purposes, so that I don’t have to bring two different items? Can I make this thing work for that purpose, and leave that thing behind? 

I love it. I think it’s the way we all should think and operate. There’s something to be said for “the right tool for the job,” but there’s also something to be said for “don’t use a lack of tools as an excuse to not do the job.”

This is the stuff that makes a nomadic life fun.

Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling author, podcast host, and content creator. Follow Kevin and his adventures while traveling and writing by visiting AuthorOnTheRoad.com.

Death unites us all (in the end).

Ah Puch, the Mayan Death God
Kevin Tumlinson | WrittenWorld.us

What’s one thing we all have in common?

Regardless of your wealth or poverty, your skin color, your nationality, your politics, or even religious affiliation, there’s one thing you can count on sharing with every other living human being—and that is, one day, NOT being a living human being.  

Death unites us all. In the end.

In my novel The Girl in the Mayan Tomb one of the most pivotal characters never actually shows up, never has a line of dialogue, and never interacts with any of the other characters. ​Still, the Mayan god, Ah Puch, has a sinister and ominous presence in the story, for sure. He helps to drive the action, giving Dan Kotler plenty to work with regarding legend and mythos and hidden secrets. Ah Puch manages to threaten the modern world from deep within the tomb of history. Pretty cool stuff. The kind of legend that archaeological thrillers are made of.

In the book, I give some details about Ah Puch and his role in Mayan culture. There are tidbits and cool facts, plenty of Wikipedia-level information about him. I'd call it a nice overview, rather than an in-depth look into who and what he was, and that's intentional.

I'm not writing histories here, I'm writing fictional adventures. Still, you want to get some things right.

I admit that some details are skewed, if not made up entirely. There's no evidence linking Ah Puch to the Inca god Viracocha, for example. At least, none I'm aware of. But connecting those two ideas helped me to build some intrigue into the story, plus a bit of that "misplaced history" that I love folding into the batter of these books before baking them to a nice, crispy brown. Little concessions to the history behind the fiction were a necessity for the story, but the core of the Ah Puch legend is real, and I kept that intact as much as possible.

True, Ah Puch is one of the names of the Mayan god of death, darkness, and destruction, but what fascinates me is that he is also the god of birth and new beginnings, making him a study in opposites. He actually manages to embody the two extremes of human existence, as if he would be the one standing at the door between life and death, greeting you no matter which direction you're moving. That appeals to me for its aesthetic encapsulation of the cycle of life: Ah Puch alone would have a complete outsider's perspective on both life and death in the Mayan world. He'd be the unbiased witness to all of it.  

Having an outsider's perspective on something as profound as all of life and death has to lead to an equally profound level of wisdom. At least, that's how I see it, from my own highly biased perspective as a living human. And so I think it's not entirely a coincidence that one of the dominant totems for Ah Puch was the owl—a creature we've come to associate with wisdom itself. Though there's really no reason why ancient Mayan cultures would have seen the owl in just this way—I could be backfilling my own cognitive bias onto the symbolism of an ancient civilization. But the idea of "wise old Mr. Owl" has some deep roots, and there's nothing to say that ancient Mayans didn't think of owls in more or less the same way.

Again, it's fiction. I'm pretty ok with making a few leaps. 

It’s far more likely, though, that the owl became associated with Ah Puch because of his role as not only the god of death but the god of darkness and disaster as well. Owls, by their very nature, are nocturnal, hunting small prey in the night and taking them off into the darkness where they are consumed. If you happen to be a rodent, that’s some pretty disastrous stuff. I can certainly see the Mayans watching this and connecting it to their own small roles in the panoply of the Amazon jungles. If anyone was wise to the cycle of life and death, it was the Mayans.

It isn’t much of a leap to think of the god of death as a predatory bird swooping down to snatch the lives of humans, to carry them off into the dark and indiscernible underworld. ​Which underworld, however, was sort of up in the air.

In Western culture, we tend to lump the Mayans into one solid category, but their civilization was a lot more complex and nuanced than we might imagine. As a general not-quite-unified civilization, the Mayans were spread throughout Central America and Mexico, with some hints of them extending to further extremes on the Southern Continent. Mayan settlements peppered the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize—it was an empire widespread enough to rival the Roman and British empires, at least to scale, though it predated both by thousands of years.

Wrap your brain around that one for a second. The Mayans were a fully functional, tool-wielding, government-operating culture, building epic stone structures and inventing mythologies and unfolding histories before most Europeans ever were Europeans.

Though all of these Mayan tribes (if "tribes" is even the right word) shared some common core beliefs, by necessity some of the specifics would skew from the core as an ancient game of telephone played out. One tribe would take its beliefs and mythology in this slightly shifted direction, while another took it in that moderately altered perspective. As such we find that Ah Puch had a catalog of names: Hun Ahau, Yum Cimil, Cum Hau, Pukuh, Cizin, and a host of variations on some of these, alongside a plethora of mythical and mystical origins, motivations, and enemies. 

Ah Puch also ended up with a wealth of homeworlds. Nearly every Mayan group had its own ideas of where Ah Puch lived when he wasn't capturing souls on Earth, relegating them to an array of underworlds. The Yucatec Maya referred to Ah Puch's home turf as Xibaba, for example, while the Quiche Maya called the underworld Metnal.

I sort of prefer the latter.  

Metnal was the lowest level of the underworld, which makes a kind of sense. When we die, regardless of our culture and traditions, we are almost always on a one-way trip into the dirt at our feet. It's only logical that most cultures would begin to think of the afterlife as a place below us, a world played out in caverns and caves.

What I find fascinating is the presence of "levels" of the underworld in Mayan culture, in a close and bizarre parallel to the way Westerners defer to Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly Inferno, to describe the afterlife. Metnal was the lowest level of the underworld to the Mayans in much the same way that the Inferno was represented as stacked layers of hell to Europeans. What a strange place to find parallels between two distant and disparate societies, right?

And then there was the devil himself.

As a god of death, Ah Puch was associated with some of the more heinous aspects of human culture and life, including disease, war, and that horrific but macabrely fascinating practice—human sacrifice. I drew from this for Girl in the Mayan Tomb, principally the disease bits, and I regret nothing. History and legend and myth tend to have some root in real-world, discernible fact, and it seems plausible (to me, at least) that if a culture worships a god who controls disease, they might hold disease itself in some reverence. If you haven't read the book, I don't think I'm throwing any spoilers out there, but it relies pretty heavily on this idea of disease as a form of worship.

We Westerners tend to filter our perspective of history and mythology through the pantheons of ancient civilizations such as the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse. But there are so many gods out there—an endless parade of them in every culture, and in every shape and form imaginable. The thing that tingles in my brain and my soul, every time I read and learn more about these pantheons and their gods, is how similar they can be. 

Ah Puch has his parallels in the Greek god of death Thanatos (which may sound a little familiar to fans of the Avengers films and Marvel Comics in general, as an inspiration for the character Thanos). There are parallels as well with gods such as Hades (Greek), Anubis (Egyptian), Yama (Hindu), Osiris (Egyptian), Azrael (Judaism), Yan Luo (Chinese), the Morrigan (Celtic) and many, many more.

I could have chosen any Mayan death god—there were several. But Ah Puch piqued my attention for a variety of reasons. His symbols—including the skeletal figure you might expect, as well as the predatory owl—were intriguing to me, as was the sort of cognitive dissonance of his roles as both the god of death and the god of birth. His name itself was a sort of draw, giving me a chance to have Agent Roland Denzel continually fumbling it, getting close but never quite getting it right. How could I pass on a good "Ah-Choo" joke?

Trick question. I can't. 

History and mythology are so overripe with characters like Ah Puch that I could write about them for the rest of my life and still leave stories untold. That, of course, is the biggest draw of all. There's also the satisfaction of knowing I'm calling attention to characters who may otherwise have been lost to history, or at least to the pop-culture filter of history.

I'm happy to have helped bring Ah Puch into the modern spotlight a little. He probably wouldn't like it much, but it was fun all the same. Delivering a dark and forgotten god forward into history allowed me to dig a little deeper into a lost (mostly lost) culture, to think about how they thought and lived and understood the world around them, and to come away with some new insights and perspectives that I could share, hopefully in exciting, action-packed ways.

That's half of why I write in the first place—to explore the Written World we sometimes live in parallel to, and never fully realize is there. If you enjoyed this little tale …

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS LITTLE TALE …

You might enjoy a good thriller novel. And I happen to write thriller novels. Find something to keep you up all night at KevinTumlinson.com/books

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Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling thriller author and podcast host. He travels the world looking for interesting tidbits of history and culture to fold into his work, and spends much of his time writing from hotels, cafes, coffee shops, and the occasional ride line at Disney World. Find more of Kevin and his work, including novels and podcasts, at KevinTumlinson.com.