Being in a hotel is … odd.
After having spent 173 nights camping in 88 different campgrounds from January until early November, sleeping in beds at 8 different family and friend’s homes for a varying number of nights, John having driven 30,000 Vanda miles, we are on a car trip now to Florida, to see my family for Thanksgiving and to celebrate my mom’s 96th birthday! So, here we are at a Hampton Inn in Knoxville, TN. We will also travel by car to see our kids over Xmas holiday for a total of 28 hotel nights in November and December, in addition to the 3 hotel nights we had in Indianapolis in August and 3 more in Chicago in October.
Tally: 207 total days and nights gone from home and 158 nights in our own bed at home! Not bad for year 1 of retirement! I had a secret goal of wanting to be traveling more than being home, and we did it! Or rather, we are doing it…
We hiked yesterday, (of course!), on our way south, finding one of Tennessee’s stunning waterfalls, and will continue to hike and explore each day of this car trip. What a completely different experience being in the car — truth be told, I prefer Vanda — I prefer the independence, the familiarity, the comfort, the ease…and I cannot wait until January 2025 when we begin what will be a very full year of vanlife travel. Our trips will be longer, taking us to farther away places, and we will be gone from home for more days than this wonderful first year!
That you have been following our journey has been a lovely motivator for me to continue to capture our adventures, our learnings, and our growth as we created our own routines in Vanda, routines that could be experienced, examined, and modified as necessary. We have indeed made mistakes, from which new routines have been established, but truly, this year 1 of retirement has been everything we had hoped for–adventure, exploration, birds, flowers, forest bathing, scratch-cooking, finding cooperative food markets and farmers markets, composting, and spending a lot of time close to my true love, John. PS. he has driven every single mile of the 30K in Vanda this year (!); I have only needed to shop, cook, clean up, make the bed each night, and do the laundry–he does the hard part of making all of the camping reservations (we sometimes confer but I trust him completely to do this so well), plot our routes, pick our hikes, keep Vanda gassed up, set us up in camp. This is the perfect arrangement for us, we both know and appreciate our roles, as much as we appreciate what each other does for our comfort and safety.
How blessed we are! This is what we planned for and we are making it happen! What a rich, full, exciting life phase we are in and for which we have deep gratitude. Thank you for coming along for the ride.
