Sometimes as a father of 4, a nomad at heart, a remote IT Consultant, a hopeless dreamer, a type-A, I find myself pursuing too many goals. So many, that I find myself moving forward in none of them. With each of the recent choices we’ve made in the last 4 years, we’ve broken out of many of the comfortable molds that our culture has set out for us. In doing so, we’ve made our daily decision tree much more complicated and created a world that requires more effort to simply exist. The initial attitude of this post might sound depressed or overwhelmed, and that is probably accurate, but more importantly, I hope to shed light on what many people simply avoid, and I find myself wrestling with.
Lone Ranger Syndrome
One of the challenges of forging a new path through rarely charted waters is that you don’t have many people who can empathize with you. We’re making weekly decisions as a full time spontaneous family that most would only make once a year on family vacation. We’re fighting poor internet connections, bad coffee, strange noises in the middle of the night, creepers rolling through our camp, cottonmouth snakes, maintenance indicators, and daily family disasters in very small spaces. There’s nowhere to escape. Losing your cool, either inside or out, still makes the neighbors very aware that raising a family with paper-thin walls and screaming infants has not gotten easier with full time travel.
Unknowns
Each time we move, we face a multitude of unknowns that I fully embraced in our early travel months, and now after two years of moving on a weekly/bi-weekly basis, I’ve grown quite fatigued of. I love to hear the excitement in people’s voices as they find out our story of full time adventures as a family, but however much encourage that brings me to continue on, I find myself burdened by the enormous pile of decisions I’ll be making in the next week as we hitch on and move our children away from their comforts into another site where mom and dad are going to reconfigure their entire existence for another week or two. I find myself yearning for moments in the past that I had become familiar with my options, and they just worked as expected.
Secret Location
So far, we have not found the perfect place with good encrypted WiFi internet, equidistant third-wave coffee, craft brewery, safe open spaces for the kids, happy neighbors, and few bugs. If I come upon this place, I’ll secretly whisper it to other full time families, but certainly won’t broadcast it to all those who enjoy not having to pay for the more than 2 kid tax (trust me, normal 4 child families are being punished in the RV world) and showing up beat-down by 4 hours of “I’m hungry”, “When are we going to be there”, “I farted”, while driving a 26,000 lb rig down untraveled roads to a destination that may not provide half of what you truly need.
The Dream
This site, as I imagine it will have adequate shade provided by whispering willows, Craft beer on tap at the club house, with a children’s play area just next door, full hook-ups, RO water, level pads with generous spacing, at a reasonable 25-30 dollars a night.
And yet a dreamer at heart I continue on, usually with a smile on my face, thankful for the opportunity to raise children and travel the open road.
Adventure Forth–>
Scott