So, we’re in Austin. I don’t want to say it’s over, because it’s not really over. We’re never going back to our old lives! How could we? Hopefully we won’t have to.
It’s surreal to be back “home.” I use the scare quotes not because Austin isn’t home, or because it doesn’t feel like home, but because, bear with me here, everywhere has come to feel like home. We’ve gotten comfortable being just about anywhere. And we’re not planning to stay in Austin for long.
We love the “vanlife” - really and truly we do. It suits us. We’re good at it. I’m probably better at living in a van than I am at anything else I’ve ever done. It is extraordinarily gratifying to go out into the world with nothing but a trusty old van, the shit you can fit into it, and your little family, and not just making it, but thriving. And honestly, the van didn’t seem all that trusty before we left. There were moments of doubt that she would get us where we wanted to go. The first day of the trip we had to go to a mechanic because ol’ gal was gushing coolant all over the place. The next morning we had our first of several flat tires.
But we almost never thought we’d made a mistake. We never did after the first two weeks. There was one hot, windy afternoon in Big Bend when I freaked out, feeling like we were going to be in the desert forever. My skin was so dry it would bleed at the slightest touch. The wind made doing things outside claustrophobic and unmanageable. It picked up my heavy old MacBook and threw it off the picnic table like a napkin. The van offered no refuge at all from the heat. Hardly more than a week later Portia was getting us stuck in the snow in a closed campground in New Mexico.
We had no idea what we were doing when we left on this trip, and in hindsight, did pitifully little research to try and figure it out. I figured we could sleep in the van for free a lot of nights, but had no idea how to find free camping (there’s a website, it’s called Free Campsites, how did it take us several weeks to find this out). We would get stressed trying to find a place to park it in a National Forest, never feeling certain we were actually allowed to do it. Dispersed camping information is mad vague on their websites. So we spent more money on camping the first couple weeks than we thought we would, and we’d get frustrated with ourselves and each other, frequently because we’d forget or neglect to eat important meals such as breakfast, lunch or dinner. But when we hit our stride, figured shit out, got good at cooking and snacking and crapping in the woods and never paying for a place to camp; goddamn, that felt so good.
Camping for free has its advantages beyond the financial too. The pursuit of a good place to sleep without paying brought us to incredible places where we could be totally alone for days at a time. Beautiful places that very few people ever see. We’d drive for an hour down a dirt road into, like, a rain forest and camp in a place that felt like magic and felt like our own. We saw the national parks, and had some incredible experiences in them. But nothing moved or awed me like the places we would find ourselves alone.
We took too many pictures of sunsets. We played so many games (Phase 10, Quixx, 10,000). Portia finished the trip by beating me mercilessly in every game we played for probably a month, an incredible streak. Townes was stoked about spending almost every waking second with us, but still complained loudly when left alone. Our weight and the softness of our bellies fluctuated greatly depending on if we were spending time camping alone or in cities eating and drinking with friends and family. I read a bunch of books, Portia wrote in her journal and played an obscene amount of Bejeweled on her phone. We learned to sit with and enjoy silence. We went to bed early a lot. Saw a lot of cute animals, none better than the shaggy mountain goat in Glacier National Park that I barely resisted trying to hug. Held our pee for too long one or two nights for fear of bears that we never actually got to see, to our simultaneous relief and regret. We lived small and cheap and free.
So after all that living, we have to decide what our return to the real world will look like. Luckily, we’ve got options. We could live in a real house, but we don’t really want to yet. We’re scheming to stay in an RV park in Dripping Springs in Hill Country outside of Austin for a couple of months. We don’t want to be done with the van and the life just yet. We daydream about buying another van or RV, patching together work, running a small internet business and bouncing around indefinitely. Or buying a cheap little house in a small town. Whatever we do, we’ll try to find ways to help others. We’re lucky to have this experience, and to have all these options in front of us. We know not everyone is, and we know that disparity might worsen in the near future. It’s a struggle for me, personally, to have such intimate knowledge of the good and beautiful things in this world, while also knowing how much ugliness there is along side it. We’re going to do more to help others, and hopefully make things just a little bit better.
I hope my nieces get the chance to do what they want to do the way I did. I hope if they decide to go see America, we’ve succeeding in protecting our public lands and our environment so that the America they see is just as beautiful as the one I just saw. I hope their kids can do it someday too.
I want to sincerely thank all the people who have been so kind and generous to us on the road. People who housed us and fed us and gave us drinks and showers and laundry and boat rides and a plane ride. Everyone who pointed us towards cool shit to do and see. Everyone whose love and enthusiasm made us want to live close to them (we found that generally, our current favorite for a place to move to is wherever we went last). My brother TJ for trying to help me figure out what was wrong with the van all the time and how we should fix it, but even more so for encouraging us to keep going when I started to think it might be time to stop. Portia’s parents for so many things, material and otherwise. Thanks to everyone who loved on Townes and gave him something to squeal with excitement about. So many people deserve to be thanked by name, but the music is playing and they’re about to come force me off the stage. We owe a lot of you postcards, and hopefully we’ll get around to sending you one soon.
We love you all. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, good tidings, good vibes to all of you, even, in the words of President-Elect Trump, the haters and losers. Let’s get to work on the next dream.
-kf-