A Simple Life

The visit “home” this year, a lot of people asked us how we are liking
the RV lifestyle. Are we still happy living in 350 sq. ft., rolling
around America? Starting our fourth year as full time RVers, we’re
looking at the pros and cons.

The newness has definitely worn off. The couch needs recovering. But we
can honestly say we like what we’re doing. We prefer it to anything
else we can think of right now, given that we haven’t won the lottery.

There is virtually nothing we dislike about our lifestyle enough to
even really write about. I don’t like having to use commercial
laundries, but it’s just a blip in my week. And occasionally a very
interesting blip at that. Dave can’t think of anything he doesn’t like
about the way we live.

We both love the job we have with Southeast Publications and agree that
we might not be so happy with the lifestyle if we didn’t have the job.
The job gives us a purpose every day, which we have found is important.
The six months we hung out in the Arizona and New Mexico desert was
just about the maximum we could do, just hanging out.

Right now we have another dead mouse somewhere in the walls. I really
don’t like the smell of dead mouse and Dave really doesn’t like to hear
me complain about it because there is nothing to be done to fix it.
This mouse is tiny, though, so won’t be as bad as the last one. (We
trapped the mother and a day later a baby mouse crept out of the
cupboard and died. We’re hoping there wasn’t a big litter.)

We’ve said many times how amazed we are that whatever we need we seem
to have. Our lives are very simple compared to five years ago. Simple
is good for us. And there is a quiet joy in recognizing this. We had a
joyful chuckle just the other day when Dave got a farmer’s discount on
the air filter he needed for the bus engine. Simple.

Life on the road does not always feel secure. For example, we often are
not sure where we can get fuel or spend the night. We never worry about
it. I don’t know if that’s just us or if we have learned to trust
ourselves, that we’ll figure something out.

Davey and I have developed patterns that provide the comfort of routine
without digging a rut. He gets up before I’m awake, showers and dresses
and makes himself a cup of coffee. I wake up to the smell of his
after-shave balm (occasionally tilex) and make the beds, shower and get
myself together while Dave eats his breakfast. We get up around 7 AM
and usually have an hour of work at home if we€™re working. If we are
not working, or if it’s the weekend, we do the same things we did when
we lived in Bend, except we have new country to explore.

He drives; I cook. I’m going to learn to drive, but still won’t drive
much (we don’t go that far every day). I do the laundry; he cleans the
floors and the bathroom. I do the sales calls; Dave does the computer
graphics. We both take a lot of naps.

It isn’t the travel that is broadening our awareness of the country
(and ourselves), it’s the staying in one town for two weeks . Being
exposed to different cultural values is helping us stay open to views
other than our own. We notice as we get older, we get pretty set in our
ways and talking to people who live differently provides an opportunity
to try to understand, to learn to see without judging.

The job offers us kind of a hard choice in terms of where to travel. We
make more money, usually, by mapping the same parks year after year.
But weâ™re drawn to new areas, or at least new towns in the same region,
so we’ll probably never have a “set” route.

We miss our friends and can’t say that we make any real friendships on
the road, except for our managers. We are still trying to get a park in
Pahrump, Nevada to spend a week or so with our friends the McGills. But
we do feel that we communicate with friends more than we might if we
were living in East Senior, OR. We are not sure we would be living in
Bend if we were stationary.

We are in La Grande, OR now, working at Eagles Hot Lake RV Park. When
we agreed to do this job, we thought we had never been here, but once
here we remembered it. You old OBR people will remember it too. About
the third year of the Oregon Bike Ride we stayed here at the Hot
Springs; Dave and I remember sitting on the green lawns and watching
copious spreads of goose poop bounce up and down as the train went by.
The park is great, 100 grassy sites under a big hill that pioneers
skirted on the Oregon Trail.

Best of all, we spent a delightful three hour lunch with Bruce Nolf and
his partner, Jerri, today. Eating and drinking with friends who share
your history is such a gift to us. We thoroughly enjoyed Jerri, who
shares a lot of history with us in things she does and loves, and
places she has lived. They have a wonderful little house in Cove,
about 10 miles east of La Grande, with gardens and a shop and
reflective of their many interests. We were going to have them over for
dinner in the Bird, but Bruce is heading off tonight to lead a
rock-study group into the Wallowas, so Jerri fixed us a fantastic meal,
topped off with their own blackberries in a great pie.

Going back to the analysis of our lifestyle for a minute, I think we
probably embraced the simplicity of full time RVing perhaps because our
lives were so stressful the last few years we had Q Photo. We longed
for simplicity. What sort of surprises me is that we are still
embracing the simplicity, and appreciate what it offers us. It occurred
to me the other day that even our platitudes have become pithy. A
certain smartness I once admired has become fairly straightforward:
“Don’t go to sleep while your meat is on the fire.” Pretty simple.

Around Monday or Tuesday we head for Utah. A quick stop in Logan at the
storage unit and we will start the Wasatch Mountain job and hope to
beat the snows.

Love to all,