How embarrassing, it looks like my last post here was as I was wrapping up my first van life experiment, almost two years ago.
And it really wasn’t fair of me to ghost the page because there really was a lot going on over that time. I never really recapped the big 2020 road trip. I said nothing at all about the winter 2021 Grand Canyon kayaking trip. I didn’t share my learning experiences from a short-lived fast fire romantic relationship that overlapped with the GC trip, either. And then I’ve left this page in the dark – in favor of Facebook – about the latest stages of my journey.
Really, the truth is that I’ve mostly moved to my personal Facebook feed as my main online social outlet. In a lot of ways it’s just more convenient, if only because I know people are actually reading over there. This page gets very little feedback so I really don’t know who is reading it, and yes, I am an attention whore and crave feedback.
Anyway, here’s a paragraph on each of those events in case you need to understand my whole story just from this page.
A Facebook friend invited me to join him on a winter trip down the Grand Canyon last winter. It was the second time he invited me, the first having fallen through because I just had too many hearings to be able to keep the time off without doing serious financial damage. It was 18 days of paddling 228 miles in late January into February, ending the day before my 40th birthday. A month before that, I got a Facebook message out of the blue from someone who said she read this page and wanted to get to know me. Turned out she lived in Flagstaff, so I said let’s be friends so I don’t have to spend my birthday alone while on the road home from Flagstaff. We made a plan to meet up at the start of my trip, and we clicked. We texted on my InReach during the trip (I know, I shouldn’t have) and then dated for another couple months after. It ultimately didn’t work out so well, initially because of logistics but ultimately we just weren’t on the same timelines; she ended up marrying someone else within four months, which incidentally is the second time I’ve had that happen.
Anyway, the one good thing that came of that, apart from a lot of soul-searching about what I should be looking for in a mate, is that considering a cross-country move forced me to take a critical look at my finances, which were in bad shape. I made some tweaks in my life after that and did make some huge strides toward paying down debts in the last year or so.
Now, I’ve had another birthday and am now solidly “in my forties” which I guess is even more middle-aged than 40 was. And I’ve come to feel really acutely self-conscious about not being where I want to be. Where am I? Mostly stuck in Buffalo, working a lot but not really working that effectively, not traveling that much and paddling even less. I’ve only paddled 16 times this whole year so far, including pool sessions; I had that many just during the Grand trip last year, and indeed this is the lowest day count I’ve had YTD a third into the year in, well, years. And I’m just plain not happy. I’m socially isolated. My depression is pretty consistently bad. I don’t really feel like anything is really going that well. I feel like I’m stagnating, and I feel trapped.
I started really feeling this way more acutely around my birthday, but honestly it’s been brewing for a long time. I announced, to a limited audience anyway, my intention to make a bold move and exit Buffalo, selling my house and maybe heading to the Smokies, ideally buying some land right away. In the last couple months I’ve done a lot of research including a lot on the real estate side, and well, the numbers aren’t working. I’m not well-situated to get a mortgage right now, and while there is some land I could afford after selling my house, nothing I can afford is really that ideal for how I want to use it. And I haven’t quite worked out making my firm operate at full-capacity while I’m on the road. I thought I had, two years ago, but now I’m more attuned to my professional deficiencies and growth areas.
I’ve gone back and forth on folding my firm altogether to “retire” to full time nomadic life, or going nomadic while doing exactly the same work remotely, or at one point, maybe just staying the course a little while longer.
Here, by the way, is the argument for staying the course a little while longer: Over the last year, while working hard at the law practice and side hustling with rideshare, I’ve paid off or helpfully restructured almost $50k in bad debts. If I stay the course, I’m about another year I could finally have a decent financial profile with very low monthly expenses and a credit profile decently compatible with getting a modest mortgage and building my dream homestead/campground. Real estate prices have a fair shot of staying in a similar range over just a year or so. And if I am very careful with my practice, I may be better situated for a mortgage in terms of documented income, as well. However, it would look like capitulation; it would be going back on a commitment I made to myself to, basically, just fucking do it already, as I’ve been putting it off for too long.
The god’s honest truth of the matter is that waiting a while does make a lot of rational sense. My income is higher running the firm full-time and more hands-on. If I rush to move without tolerating distractions, I won’t really paddle much at all this summer, instead spending that time and money on logistics. And anyway, none of the classes I need for the next phase – more on that later – are even offered over the summer anyway, so leaving now versus in the fall doesn’t really help me, and finally I have made some tweaks to my practice that should allow me to travel and paddle most of the summer.
So, I guess we are kind of embarrassingly back in a kind of holding pattern, but that’s okay. This is going to be take three at the travel life, post-pandemic edition. I’ll try to keep you updated a little more than last year.
