Eight months on the road!
Pros and cons of rolling around in our Airstream.
Wassup, Traipser! Dakota here with my newsletter, which I started 13 years ago when typewriters were more popular than iPhones.
AI wasn’t around then and I sure as hell don’t use it to write now. (It would scrub my jokes, probably comma splices too!) Vamoose, robots, this is MY newsletter about creativity, travel and living our best life.
Kicking today off with a quote from novelist Hermann Hesse on what we all can do:
“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.”
Here in Airstream land, we’re continuing our Canadian summer adventure. Unfortunately, like half of North America and Europe, we spent some of July plagued by heat and wildfire smoke. There was at least solidarity in joining 100 million other people in the thrilling hobby of refreshing Purple Air.
Then, the wind out west shifted and I was hit with a flash of inspiration about where to go. We scrapped previously-laid plans and (almost) squealed the Airstream tires in our joy.
After a long detour around a fire and a big drive day, we caught the 7 p.m. ferry from Vancouver, B.C. to the Sunshine Coast with just minutes to spare. I was so excited that I launched the Airstream into low orbit on a speed bump.
Eight months of travel
Such is life in this era of a cooking planet. I’m just glad we’ve got wheels and can move. (In fact, a smoke escape rig is the entire reason we bought the Airstream.)
Meanwhile, time keeps rolling on. We pulled out of Bend in the Airstream at the beginning of December and somehow it’s been eight months?!
It feels like we’re just getting warmed up, and not just by forest fires. (AI for sure would have deleted that joke and replaced it with “the realization shows up quietly“ or some bullshit.)
Eight months! While we’d done a dozen tester trips in the trailer before this long one, including two months in Washington, we weren’t sure how months and months would go.
There are ups and downs traveling, but what I wrote a two months in remains true:
“Luckily, the balance tilts strongly in favor of the positive experiences. While it’s nothing special—any fool can hitch up a trailer and tow it around—it’s enabling what we want right now.”
“What we want” is a change of pace and a chance to explore beautiful places. And boy is this Canadian summer adventure stacked up with stunning places.
Two weeks each in spectacular Banff and Jasper National Parks, ogling icy lakes at Mt. Robson, exploring the fabulous trail system in Valemount, and waterfalls in Wells Gray Provincial Park? Lucky us.
Plus we’ve got the bonus of traveling with Chelsea’s brother Jesse and his fiance Rachel all summer.
How long do we want to roll?
Rachel’s parents visited Jasper and asked us “how long do you think you’ll travel?” I guessed a few years; Chelsea launched into the stratosphere with “a decade!”
Really, we have no idea. We’re still loving voyaging this way and there are many places to visit, so forecasting feels impossible. Our desires could change on a dime.
If a little smoke and fire can temporarily derail the Airstream train, our finely-laid plans of mice and men stand no chance against the stark reality of potential show-stoppers. Off the top of my head:
Health issues for us or family.
Financial changes.
Either of us being donnnne managing trailer life logistics.
Me getting an offer to play piano for millions a year in Dubai.
Extreme weather that makes traveling not feel safe or worth it. (Lightning, tornadoes and hailstones the size of bricks, oh my.)
Wanting the normalcy and routine of being in a place we know well.
One of those items is less likely... I hear Dubai is stupid hot anyway.
Pros and cons of travel
If you’re picturing us getting up at 6 am every day to head out for an epic adventure, emerging from the wilderness dirty and grinning at sunset, uhhhh, no.
In many ways, a trip this long reverts back to the mean of regular life. We’ve still gotta do laundry! Vegetables don’t self-shop or chop themselves into neat piles for a chef robot!
In fact, before we hit the road, we talked about how it was mandatory that we maintain healthy habits and routines or else this mid-life jaunt wouldn’t work. I can stuff myself silly with pizza and gelato for a few weeks in Italy, but months and months of that means becoming the Dakotabury Doughboy.
Mostly, this is just life with varying backdrops. Sure, we explore new places, but we still cook and clean, stay in touch with parents and friends, do workouts so our midsections don’t turn into trembling pudding, and deal with the adulting stuff every human encounters.
Normal life, as lived in a shiny silver tube.
The upsides:
That said, you better believe there are some pluses to living this way!
We wake up somewhere beautiful most mornings.
Most days feature something special, from baby ground squirrels chasing each other to large mamma elk grazing with their babies to panoramic views during hikes and bike rides.
Jasper rainbow that lasted forevvver. The New Relationship energy is real! It feeds the elation I feel on a fantastic hike or bike ride, the dopamine rolling through beautiful landscapes, the excitement at meeting new friends during our travels. (No strangers, just people who aren’t friends yet.)
Life feels simpler living in <200sf. It takes only six minutes to vacuum; there’s only one toilet and shower to clean.
Any annoying situation with campgrounds resolves quickly because we move on quickly. Neighbor’s rumbling truck waking me up at 7 am? All good, we’re on our way soon enough.
With limited time in each place, I’m motivated to get out and explore vs. sit on my duff and play piano. (I’ve been playing less, which pains me, but is a worthwhile tradeoff.)
With a new portable battery, I can set up my piano anywhere! That said, the pace of travel that we’ve chosen allows for chill days without feeling like I’m going to miss a must-do activity in the area or having to DO THE THING while it’s pouring rain.
It’s affordable, especially this leg in Canada! Even for full-hookup sites this summer (aka all utilities), we’ll spend less than $1,000 per month on lodging. (Contrast that with a European vacation or Hawaii!) I’m happy to pay for the convenience and certainty of a comfortable place to land vs. spending hours searching for a free place to stay.
We’re untethered from the dock of home, so me jetting off to Italy for a month with my mom was simple.
The downsides:
Sure, there are downsides. Gotta be. I kinda don’t want to share them because we’ve got it so good, but for those considering this lifestyle, FINE, here!
We’re away from a known, comfortable community and the friends in that place.
As I wrote about in the tradeoffs of travel earlier this year, rolling around requires managing systems that we take for granted at home. (Fresh water, power, sewage.) It’s not for everyone and there’s a mental load always spinning in the back of our heads.
Planning and booking full-time travel is a part-time job, especially when heat, fires, and smoke get tossed into the equation. I must be getting old because I want to say “Remember when you could make plans for July and August!?”
No dishwasher, boohoo wah wah. A worthwhile tradeoff.
We can’t make 3x batches of meals to freeze in bulk, so we spend more time cooking and eat simpler meals.
We’re more exposed to extreme weather. When it’s hot and we’re off grid, we sweat. When it’s smoky, the Airstream isn’t exactly a clean room at a computer chip manufacturer…
The comforts of home
Now that I’m in my 40s and soft as fuck, I can’t imagine long-term travel without many of the conveniences of a modern (American) home. I appreciate the luxury of the Airsteam every day: a hot shower, a microwave, water boiler, and a toilet are not underrated.
I can sleep in a tent on bikepacking trips or the back of the truck for a few nights, but for months and months on the road? Give me convenience and a clear view of the sky for Starlink so I can take a piano lesson.
A recent post from our friends Living in Beauty about living in their Airstream for a decade had many parts that resonated with me, including:
“We no longer measure success by miles traveled. Staying somewhere long enough to feel its particular rhythm, notice its quirks, and imagine what it might be like to live there.”
They also talk about letting go of the “RV adventure” idea and living off-grid all the time.
Agreed! Boondocking is fun sometimes (and we’ve done weeks and weeks of it), but often it means moving around a lot and dealing with logistics. For us, I’d sum up our camping desires mostly as “a private, quiet campsite with full hookups, a view of nature, and trails out the door.”
We continue to aspire to Living in Beauty’s 4/3/2 rule: no more than 4 hours of driving, arrive by 3 p.m., stay 2 weeks. Tough these days with booked-out campgrounds since Canadians and half the world are avoiding travel in the U.S. (so many Europeans in Banff and Jasper!), but we’re doing our best.
Right now, we’re feeling calm and collected with a comfy spot for 2.5 weeks in the mossy forest on the Sunshine Coast. Day one, I was practically hooting in delight while mountain biking on Mach Chicken, a speedfest that brought out childlike glee. Later that day, a new friend cued us into an orca pod that cavorted just offshore, then invited me to join an evening paddleboard session.
We hung out afterward on the beach and watched the sunset, the haze and rancid smell of smoke a distant memory. It was a good-as-it-gets travel day, the kind it’s worth journeying for.
I could handle a decade of days like that.
Traipsing Tidbits
A few things that I’ve enjoyed:
My fav positive newsletter, Fix the News, pointed out that fire activity in the southern hemisphere is actually decreasing due to longer rainy seasons.
Lately I’m loving listening to and learning Mexican pianist Gibran Alcocer’s music, including this compilation from the Elbphilharmonie space in Hamburg.
From this essay: This essential — existential — phenomenon, our sense that we are reading the work of another human being, someone with connections to others, to a time and a place, someone to whom we might relate our own life stories, is our strongest reason not to cede too much ground to AI-generated text.
Traipsing About is off searching for orcas, but here’s a quote for the road:
From The Busyness Trap by Tim Kreider:
Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say, but I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last good hard laugh with Harold. Life is too short to be busy.
Onward,
Dakota
P.S. Fun wordplay: “You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”
Love this and love your life philosophy. Happy travels!
I still love reading your posts. I miss my van life today.