An announcement: we’re on the road again. Four weeks ago, we sold our house. Three weeks ago, we bought a vintage (“vintage” is an official rebranding of just plain “old”) Class A motorhome. Two weeks ago, we moved out of our house into our RV, and now we’re full-timers.

Above: our first home. Below: our second home. 

Please forward our mail to this address. Thank you.

Selling our first house wasn’t easy, by any stretch. People do this all the time, yet for us it seemed a monumental task. We disliked every part of the process, from working with real estate agents to staging the home (goodbye, cherished family photos!) to disappearing on command during showings and open houses to negotiating complicated repair and inspection requests. Signing the papers at closing was painfully bittersweet. Ultimately, though, both the worst and the best part of the entire tedious process turned out to be the sorting, the culling, and the discarding.

Seriously, did I need every hotel toiletry?

N and I traveled and lived on boats, both together and separately, for nearly ten years. And we lived in our first house almost that long, too. Although we thought of ourselves as minimalists, in that we didn’t have kids, or expensive electronic habits, or just lots of trinkets and knickknacks, we were still stunned by the overwhelming avalanche of our everyday stuff. I’ll confess to a serious paper book addiction; though I do accumulate books, I also give them away as soon they’re read, and the disconcerting amount of kitchenware is certainly my fault, too. But we packed box after box after box, and we spent days transporting those boxes into trucks and then into family basements and garages and a rented storage unit, and even now, I’m not sure what I’d miss if it all disappeared. It turns out that you really don’t need that much, after all. I’ve sworn that I’m never buying anything that is not food or drink ever again.

So in the midst of all that stress and drama we moved a few clothes and shoes, a dozen or so books, some pots and pans, a couple of good knives and a cutting board, tubs of spices and pantry staples, our bikes and a wooden tray of plant cuttings into our RV, and that’s it for now. We spent a couple of weeks at our local fairgrounds, which was a great place to get our feet wet (mostly metaphorically) and learn our RV’s systems, plus repair things that were broken after a winter of disuse. (Pro tip: never, ever buy an RV that has been “winterized.” It just means that anything to do with water is cracked, and the sellers don’t want to fix it.) We’re at the moment in the wilds of southern Colorado, just outside Pagosa Springs, after a white-knuckle descent down Wolf Creek Pass where we had to give our brakes a cooldown time-out. Tomorrow we might treat ourselves to the hot springs and a local microbrew or two.

The first meal I cooked on the RV after we filled the propane: cheesy pasta with fresh herbs. (I harvested all the herbs from my garden the day we moved out.)

After that, we’re going to go back to the Western Slope, and we’re going to try our damnedest to find Quiet Farm. We haven’t given up, but we’ve reorganized our dreams just a touch, because we wanted to sell our house in Denver at an ideal time, and we couldn’t come to terms on the property we loved in Delta County. So we’re going to start over, carrying our new house with us, and hopefully find what we’ve been looking for all along. Come along with us for this new adventure, friends. If we can get around New Zealand in a ramshackle converted Ford Transit, we can find Quiet Farm with this. We can’t wait to share what we discover.