After yet another van accident last year, I decided I’d had enough. It was time to move somewhere, find a job, and get out of van life and back into an apartment. Eventually I moved to Pittsfield, MA, where I got a full-time job and started saving for the roughly $3,000 it takes just to move into an apartment these days.
After a month or so I realized I should have moved to State College instead to be near my son as he finishes high school, so that’s what I decided to do. I’ll be headed back there late in July. And again my plan has been to find a job in town and an apartment.
In the past few weeks, though, I’ve started to wonder if that’s the right plan. Not the State College part — I’m definitely doing that. I mean the apartment part. I want an apartment because I want my own toilet and shower and kitchen. I’m tired of showering at the gym and pooping at the grocery store and eating mostly prepared food. (My current van set-up doesn’t have a stove, although it used to and could again.)
All those things, though, could be present in a better van or a tiny RV. My son plans to leave State College when he’s done with high school, and I plan to leave then, too. If I could find a remote job, I wouldn’t even have to start the dreaded application process over again when it’s time to move. And if that were true, and I had a better home on wheels, maybe I could live the nomad life I had hoped to live when I started this whole journey in December 2020.
Nobody to whom I’ve said any of this has supported this idea. Everyone just reminds me how much I want to be out of my van. But I don’t know. Do I want to be out of a van, period, or out of my series of busted minivans? I have more thinking to do, and in any case I won’t be able to act on either path until I’ve saved up more money, so some thinking time is built in.
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