Ranch Life

So Sy and I have settled in at the ranch.  It has been a long couple of months since my last post.  Our original plan had been to go live straight in the bus.  In some way our staying at the ranch has helped in the sense that we can acclimate to a smaller living environment before we go to live on the bus.  We will be here a few more months, as we sort and dispose of our unnecessary stuff.

I have been working for Dad as he has work available to make a little money to catch up bills and buy materials to build the bus.  We have also been helping out around the ranch, with feeding and watering chores.  I have been helping Dad with some of his projects as well.  Dad and I have also been scrapping around the county.  His goal is to clean up the county one neighbor at a time.  Many of the neighbors have replaced old fence lines which generate tons of scrap used barbed wire and fence posts.  We have also found old trash piles with scrap metal from vehicles, and household goods.  I found a piece last week that was stamped 1902.

Sy has been busy making jewelry to put in local gift shops to help make a little extra money.  She has been acquiring beads and materials for years without making a lot of stuff.  She now has time to make this and has been getting good comments so far on her work.  If you find yourself in Raton NM, Check out Bear Country Gifts on Park ave.  This shop has a variety of handmade gifts from regional artists and crafters.  There are many unique gifts in this shop.

It has been a cold windy winter here.  During the recent cold snap in early February, we had to deal with frozen pipes, and living in a house that has the R-value of a colander.  We are staying in the bunkhouse which has seen better days.  I am thankful for a place to stay, but it has been a challenge.  We just got internet service to the bunkhouse last week.  I needed the technical help of my brother Mike to set up wireless service with Mom and Dad's DSL.  Our Sprint airtime card and Droid phones do not have service this far out in the country.

We are both happy that Spring is almost here.  The trees are already starting to bud out and show early foliage.   It won't be long, and we will be helping Mom in her garden.  I also have a friend in Arkansas who I would like to visit this spring to help in his garden.  We are already making plans for this fall to make Prickly Pear Jelly.  I have been scouting good cactus stands as we work around the ranch.

I hope everybody has had a good new year so far and I will write more soon.

Quick Update

It has been awhile since I posted, but here goes with a brief update.  I have been working with Dad on a house for the last two weeks.  We are getting everything packed and ready to haul to the ranch.  After discussing it with Mom and Dad it was decided that we will stay with them for a bit and I can help Dad with some work he has had come up, and he can help us build our bus into a comfortable living space.  Sy will help Mom around the ranch while I'm working with Dad.  In our spare time we will finish sorting our belongings and putting some in storage in our shed at the ranch.  Some is going with us, and some we will sell along the way.

Right now we are just trying to get it packed so that we can get it out of this house.  Dad is bringing a stock trailer and I think with that and the bus and the van, we can get just about everything out of the house in this next week.  Sy took a van load down this past week and baby sat the horses and dogs while Mom took a friend to Amarillo for medical stuff.

I took the bus to have an emissions test and be weighed on Monday.  It has passed emissions and can now be licensed.  Our insurance company is going to drop coverage on the bus in February because the underwriting dept will not cover it.  So I will be shopping our insurance around very soon.

I need to get back to packing.  For the near future, I will probably update this blog about once a week.  In a couple of months, When we hit the road for real, I will update more often on our adventures in Nomadism.  We want to get to Phoenix and San Antonio in the Spring before it gets too hot to be tolerable.  Please keep checking back or subscribe for updates.  Thanks for reading.

We Will Have Our Bus on Saturday

Another critical step on this path to being location independent is to get our bus/home.  We have made an offer on a bus and it will be delivered to us on Saturday.  We are excited.  We have been sorting.  Dad will be here this week to help move my shed to the ranch so that we have storage.  We have started to acquire some stuff for our conversion of the bus into a nice RV Coach.  We have worked on some general design ideas, and will get more into details once we have the bus in our possession.

We continue to sort stuff into sell, free, storage, and take with piles.  It is amazing how much crap we have accumulated in ten short years.  It started tough, but the more we get rid of the easier gets.  We will be having a huge indoor moving sale within the next couple of weeks.  

Downsizing Begins

We have started down the path.  We made an offer on the church bus in Pueblo.  They had another couple scheduled to look at it as well.  We made a fair offer and hope to hear back later this week.  We talked to the pastor for quite sometime while going over this bus.  If we don't get this one, we will find another one.  There is a glut of buses on the market.  It is mostly a matter of just finding the right deal.

We have started liquidating our possessions via craigslist and such.  It is amazing how much we have acquired in just ten years.  This is a difficult process.  We had a hard time at first.  We found that our attachment to things was strong, even though it may be stuff we don't even use.  Many things are obvious that it is junk that just needs to go.  Other things are tougher as we decide what we will want and need with us and what we will put in storage.  Dealing with some of the folks on Craigslist is also a big happy joy.  We will likely have an indoor yard sale in the very near future.

While we have been sorting and taking pics for this process, we have started talking about how we will trick out our bus.  We will have to start with a generator, but are researching possibly building a wind turbine as well as solar panels.  We are trading a table saw for a solar shower and a two burner camp stove.  We are considering building a portable solar oven.  We have a single burner camp stove and a turkey fryer burner to do most of our cooking. We are looking for a composting toilet to buy or trade for.  We will take our queen size memory foam mattress and will build a frame into our overall design.  We are also considering a space for growing herbs and fresh vegetables by using a vertical growing and drip system system and a couple of grow lights.

We are still struggling with the decision to live in a bus.  Sy and I are both intellectually fine with it.  We are both smart strong adults who can list all of the reasons why we should do this as well as the few for why we shouldn't.  Emotionally this has been a trying experience, but we are both growing from the experience.  We are supporting each other like we haven't in a long time.  Overall, this so far is turning into a positive experience for both of us.  

I am kind of anxious to just get on with it, and have to often remind myself to slow down and get through the downsizing process first.  I strive to take life each moment at a time now instead of being caught up in the drama of the past and the worry of the future.  We are only alive right now.  That's all we ever have.  This is the essence of our decision to make this life style change.  Yes other factors make it easier, but we decided that we simply want to live on our time, right now.

Have a Zen day. 

The First Steps to Location Independent

We are now a few days into our decision to transition to location independent living.  We went into high gear trying to find a suitable ride.  We have looked at several motor homes, and even made an offer on one yesterday.  The gentleman wasn't apparently as motivated of a  seller as I thought him to be.  We are fine with that though as we have been considering the bus/conversion option as well.  If I had the money we would love to be cruising around in an older Wanderlodge by Bluebird.

As it stands, we are now looking at purchasing a school or church bus and roughing it while we build our own custom coach as we go.  We are both internet savvy, and Craigslist has tons of treasures if one has the time and patience to find them.  I was surprised that it was Sy pushing me for this option.  She has been camping only a few times and we roughed it in a tent for a couple of nights at a time.  I was the one being a whiner about not having a bed and a shower, the guy who lived on the streets of Colorado Springs for a year as a 19 something.

We are going to look at a Partridge familyish church bus tomorrow.  It is well within our price range and the lady has already volunteered that she is willing to negotiate on the price.  There is a glut of retired school buses on the market in our price range.  We are thinking that we will build as we go along.  We will start with the most basic necessities such as a composting toilet, and a generator, and water storage and disposal.  Our camping setup will need to be upgraded just a bit to accommodate everyday cooking use.

We are already working on a rough floor plan so we have an idea of what we will need to acquire to convert said bus to a nice RV.  We will eventually be completely solar powered.  We are playing with the idea of a gravity fed water system.  By using a composting toilet, we will not need to have or clean a black water tank.  Our gray water can be used to water a lawn.  Down the road we will spend the money to convert the diesel to run on used vegetable oil.  It runs a couple of grand for that conversion, but will save bazillions over the life of the vehicle with the added benefit of  a much lower environmental footprint.

After much consideration we decided a bus is a better built and safer vehicle than most motor homes. We can build it to suit us.  We are excited and scared at the same time.  It is going to be a great adventure, and we can't wait.

The Choice is Made

Sy and I have made the decision to go nomadic.  We were leaning yesterday.  We continued talking ourselves into it today.  We are going to look at a nice motor home tomorrow.  It is taking a new set of eyes to determine how to proceed.  Everything will be a new challenge for awhile as we transition.

We can take a limited amount of stuff on the road with us including our tools to make our living.  We have already sold and given away a ton of crap this year.  We are now going through the process of trying to guess what we will want to keep in storage for future use when we find our five acres of paradise, and what gets liquidated.  The prospect of having the freedom to wake up anywhere we want is actually a little overwhelming.  We are already making a list of places to visit.  This list includes natural wonders and restaurants alike.  We have figured out that our biggest challenge will be downsizing our kitchen.  We are both foodies who love to create new dishes.  We now get to challenge our skills with much less space for cooking and resources.  Our four cats will be re-homed, but we are taking both dogs with us and have to consider space for their food and such.

We are looking forward to eating at local restaurants and finding food at local farmers markets from different areas of the country.  We look forward to seeing family that we haven't been able to see often.  I will be writing about our experiences along the way.  Someday they will be one set of tales out of many from this "great recession."  I hope folks will follow along as we take this crazy adventure into location independent living.

The Road Less Traveled

There come times in our lives where we are presented extraordinary choices and opportunities.  Sy and I are at a point in our lives where we have the opportunity to really evaluate a number of different directions for our lives to take. While we have discussed many ideas over the decade we have been together, we really didn't expect to be in the position we are currently in.

We are knee-deep in the foreclosure dance with Bank of America.   We have a small business which is paid for other than monthly expenses.  Unfortunately, we started a business that in my industry slows down when the cold comes.  We have minimized our household bills as much as possible for our acceptable standard of living, and we continue to be behind on our bills.  We are better off than a large majority of Americans who are still struggling with significant debt.  Our only debt is our mortgage and we had one of those mortgages that is in the news right now.  We should not have qualified, and we struggled to pay it consistently the entire time we have lived here.

We are now faced with the question: Where do we go from here.  As I stated earlier, we have discussed where we want to head in life, what our dream house will look like when we build it,  how we want to live our lives.  We both see a huge economic storm still lingering over the United States for the next several years.  We are prepared to use our various skills and trades to make a living.  We seek a simple life without the corrosion of the rat race.  Our long-term dream is to someday buy a small piece of rural property somewhere and build a sustainable, eco-friendly hobbit hole that is off the grid.  We ultimately seek to be self supporting in raising our own food and ply our crafts and trades for whatever else we may need.  That being said, we are not quite in a position to do that just yet.  We have discussed two basic plans with various options.

I will start with the more traditional plan.  That is, we find a place to rent that we can afford.  We are looking at studio and one bedroom apartments.  They are fairly inexpensive and I have found that in the current housing crisis, more rental properties are pet friendly than I remember  from past renting experiences.  Our overhead would be fairly low.  Some of our options for this plan revolve around auto glass repair.  We can rent and stay in Colorado Springs, one of the most competitive auto glass repair and replacement markets in the world, or we can move to a smaller town and ply our trade in a rural area to make a living.  There is very little competition, but some costs of business are higher.  The one foreseeable difficulty with the rent plan is that we are still beholden to pay somebody else for our shelter each month.  If business is bad, or we get sick, things can end badly, with us not prepared to move on.  Landlords have been known to go into foreclosure as well, leaving tenants high and dry.

The second "less traditional" option we have been discussing is to live location independent.  I put less traditional in quotes here because it is actually the way most of humanity has lived at one time and 30 to 40 million still do.  I am talking about a neo-nomadic lifestyle.  The idea is that we downsize our possessions and buy an RV or coach to live in.  Living Location Independent, is not the same as homeless.  It means we live in a house we can drive down the road when we feel like moving.  The one positive thing I will probably ever say about Wal-Mart is that they are friendly to those who live in RV's and will generally let them park overnight in their parking lots.  We can also park at truck stops and in national parks and forests.  One great advantage to this plan is that we can visit family and friends that live in places we generally weren't able to afford to visit.  With the ability to set up any where and do rock chip repairs and sell our craft goods, we only need to make enough to meet our low fuel and food overhead, and pay for our cell and mobile internet service.  This lifestyle is more common than many think.  The term snowbird applies to those who live in the northern climes in summer and then migrate to places like Arizona and Florida in the winter time.  There are many Technomads, who travel around as consultants and freelance software developers.  There are many who write for a living or sell their photography online.  They may build websites or set up networks.  Often they barter for what they need.  Many Technomads travel the world this way.

Sy and I have been through hours of discussion about this and we are both in favor of the location independent path.  With the advent of the internet and cell phone technology, it is easier than ever to be a nomad and still stay in touch with family and friends.  With the lower cost of living a nomadic lifestyle, we would be able to put away for our future plans.  If we do this we know that we are giving up a certain level of comfort, but we are prepared for this.  With the looming economic and social problems piling up in this country, we almost feel as if we can weather the storm better if we have a shelter we own and can move if we need to make our ends meet.  We are both struggling to overcome the modern American consumerist mindset, or the idea that home ownership and possessions are what's best for us.  It is deeply ingrained, and as one goes through the foreclosure process, allows for depression and anger to manifest because of feelings of failure.  It doesn't matter that the system and our mortgage was designed to fail so that Wall Street speculators could rake in billions.  It has been a long arduous process of breaking free from the failure mindset and setting out to determine our next best course.  We have done a lot of research and as I said are in favor of location independent living.  As we have been doing for a few years now, we will make sustainability and eco-consciousness a focus in our lives.

We ask readers of this blog to share any thoughts you may have about location independent living in the comments.