Sticks On Dirt

I think we’ve always know that if we got ourselves another patch of dirt with some sticks on it, it’d be in one of a handful of very small places. The short list was, in the order we visited them: Apalachicola FL, Mancos CO, Washburn WI, and the Outer Banks NC (especially Okracoke Island).

These places all share one thing: they’re at the fringes of the world, a bit off the map and outside the collective consciousness of the country. Life in all of these places is distinctly different than anywhere else, and it takes a certain kind of person to live in them. When you do the land stamps itself on you.

These places all have routine hardship. Mancos and Washburn have long, hard winters¹, Apalachicola and the Outer Banks have the ever-present threat of hurricanes. Hardships like these make life more interesting. They make you feel alive.

In the end, we landed in Washburn. This is where the kids made friends and that was the deciding factor. If I were picking for myself, I might have chosen Apalachicola. Maybe Mancos. Well, truth be told, I would keep traveling, but Corrinne and the kids wanted to stay in one place for a while, have something more stable.

I think we were all finally tired of living in the bus. Last spring, after crawling out from under the bus, soaked in gasoline, having changed the fuel pump for the 4th time in 8 years, I found myself thinking, is this really an adventure or has it become more of a routine pain in the ass?

You could say that’s a small price to pay for being able to live on the road, and in some ways that’s true, but in others it isn’t. No matter how good I get at fixing the bus — and I’m not very good at it — I’m never going to stop needing to fix it. And I was tired of fixing it. When you’re fixing the same things over and over again, that’s not fun, that’s the kind of routine that travel is supposed to free you from.

That was only my experience though. For everyone else the problem was that the big blue bus had become the small blue bus. Living in such cramp quarters just wasn’t fun anymore. It was no hardship to live in a small space with five people when three of them were under the age of 6. Now that there are two teenagers and a 10-year-old boy it just wasn’t big enough for us.

We’d already decided to build out a school bus so we’d have more room. It has beds that we don’t have to make and unmake everyday. There’s a kitchen big enough for two to cook in, an oven that works, and 10 extra feet of storage. It’s enough room for us. While getting Lyme slowed me down, the plan was still to move into it this summer, right up until the end of April when we found the house we ended up buying.

We still have the school bus, we can continue to travel, but when we’re in the Washburn area, we’ll have a house rather than having to stay in Memorial Park or rent a cabin. As the one member of the family who has never liked camping in Memorial Park, I might be the happiest about that part.

It just doesn’t make sense to live in an RV if you aren’t traveling in it. They’re small and cramped, you always have to fill and empty the tanks. The payoff is when you end up somewhere new all the time. If you aren’t doing that, and we haven’t been, at least not in the summer for the past three years, then it makes more sense to live in a house in the place you want to be.

One day this spring Corrinne was out walking and saw a house for sale that fit just about everything we wanted. It had a little land (5 acres, with some ponds), but was still only a 10 minute bike ride from the center of town, so the kids can have their independence.

It’s the sort of house that really only we would like. It’s oddly laid out, curiously half-finished, painted with murals and other oddities — the last thing in the world retirees from the city would ever want (the main buyers up here). For us it’s like a blank slate we can build to suit our needs. It needs some work for sure, but we’re used to that. We found it, knew it was right for us, and made an offer the next day. It was accepted, and we moved in 45 days later.

We still plan to travel. Me especially, since travel is central to everything I enjoy doing: exploring the world and sharing my experiences in words and photos. The main difference is that now we’ll have a home base, a place where my wife and kids can feel a bit more stable.