Functionally Homeless—A New Adventure Begins!

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but for the last handful of months, I’ve been a bit… absent from the digital world. My podcast stalled (again) and I haven’t been showing up to the other show I normally attend. I’ve only made and shared a few of the rings I’ve made. I’ve made nary a post on any social media platform. And, yeesh… I certainly haven’t posted here in quite some time. About the only place I’ve been active has been the forums over at BlenderArtists.org. Suffice it to say, that something has been occupying a huge chunk of my time.

I’m stupidly excited about it.

So what is it, exactly? It’s a whole new adventure for my family, and really my life. It’s been a long time coming. The TL;DR version is this: We’re going to be living on the road for the next twelve to eighteen months.

That’s right. Traveling for at least a year. And we’re doing it in this.

Of course, with this new adventure comes a whole bevy of lifestyle changes that affect just about every part of our lives. We’ve sold our house, our cars… hell, we’ve either sold, donated, or trashed most of what we own. We’ve re-homed our bearded dragons. We’re homeschooling. Just about all of the work I do is done remotely. And, like I said, this has been a long time coming. A couple years, actually. It’s just in the last handful of months that everything has come to a head.

At this point, you might find yourself asking, “But why?”

There are too many reasons to capture in their entirety here, but it all starts with “itchy feet,” the term my parents would use to describe their inherent wanderlust. If you stand still for too long, you start to get itchy feet. The only solution is to move those feet. To go places. To explore. To see and do things you’ve never done before. Whether by conditioning or genetics, I have also been stricken with this affliction of a tingling in my paws. And, thankfully, I’ve married a woman that shares this condition.

We love travel… and not really the touristy part of it. We like to try to experience a new area as if we live there. Find local parks and trails. Buy groceries. Hang out in places where locals hang out. Breath the air and drink whatever’s in the water. That kind of stuff. And, more excitingly, we can share those experiences with our kids and help give them a sense of just how big and varied the world is.

So, now knowing why, there may be a whole slew of follow-up questions. What’s our route? How do we work? What do we do for internet? How’s our dog handling it? What kinds of sweet hacks/mods are we doing to the RV? How do we drive that thing? Isn’t it a bit cramped in there? Is it worth it?

With any luck, we’ll be able to answer those questions. To be honest, we’re still finding out some of them as we go. I’ll be posting some of the more makery/hackery things here, but if you really want answers, the best place to go is the website (and associated social media pages) that we set up to chronicle this adventure, Functionally Homeless. Right now, the site’s just a bunch of links to our social media pages, but it’ll get fleshed out soon enough.

And now that we’re actively in the throes of this journey (I’m writing this from a campsite in Raleigh, NC… almost three weeks into it), you’ll probably start seeing me around the web more regularly again.

See you around!