Beginning A Nomad Lifestyle

First mistake: Packing too much stuff

In June 2009, my husband and I became empty nesters. Other than our 60 lb dog “Onyx” – he’s a lot like having a perpetual 2 year old in tow – we no longer have children living with us.

We decided to do something quite different for us once the kids were grown and gone. We’ve heard plenty about people retiring, buying a fancy RV, and traveling all over the country of course, so we decided we’d like to try something similar ourselves. Never mind the fact that I’m only 40, he’s younger than that, and we can’t afford a fancy RV yet.

The initial idea was to take an extended camping trip while we save money to buy our own land. I work online so it doesn’t matter where we are in the world. As long as I have occasional internet access I should theoretically be able to keep the income flowing.

So we bought a small solar panel generator system to power my computer with where ever we might be, sold everything that didn’t have to be kept, put the rest in storage and hit the road.

We started out with just our Jeep Cherokee, a large tent and basic supplies. Before we even hit the road the first time we discovered we had way too much stuff with us though. The Jeep was packed so tight there was barely anywhere for the dog to sit. We tolerated it on the drive from Artesia New Mexico to Tucson Arizona, but our first order of business once we got there was to unload the Jeep and lighten our load considerably.

We went to Tucson first to visit family we hadn’t seen in several years, and we’d already decided Arizona was going to be something of a home base for us. Since it has great weather most of the year, and boasts 300+ days of sunshine it seemed like an ideal location to try our experiment. Having family in the state was a persuading factor too.

The first three months of our new lifestyle was a bit trying at times to say the least. We were stressed by very tight finances and a looming cross country trip deadline.

We had been living in a rental house for the last 5-6 years so that wasn’t something we were able to sell. We did sell 80%-90% of our belongings before heading out, but since we’ve lived fairly frugally over the years that only netted us a small bit of cash to get started with.

We also ended up driving much more than we’d planned to that first month… averaging about 300 miles per week going back and forth from Tucson to various camping spots. We spent a lot of time and money learning just how much we didn’t know in those early weeks.

One glaring example: When we first started out we had just 8 gallons of water carrying capacity. Needless to say one of our first expenses was to buy water storage containers.

Our second month out was August, and we learned that not every camping spot will work well for our solar power. In fact, we’ve discovered our ideal spots have a shady place for our tent (now a cargo trailer), plus a sunny spot for the solar panels. August was stressful because we’d committed to being back in New Mexico for a family gathering but we bent the suspension on the Jeep a week before we were supposed to go. The quick trip to New Mexico convinced us to trade our tent for a trailer and the end of August was when we needed to be in South Carolina, but money was getting slimmer by the day.

We got through it all… went across country and back… then proceeded to spend most of September resting. Details on some of the highlights will be posted here over time. Those which are already available and future posts can be found by browsing the archives section or following the links scattered through this post.

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