The Promenade
At the end of November, we were trying to find a routine for our life in San Diego. It was only our second week (we planned to stay a few months), and we were questioning if we should go to another RV park. The noise level from the freeway was hard to adjust to. What if we found another location that was quieter and not surrounded by construction for a new bike trail? We had trains running beside us throughout the day and night. That track was under construction too. We had good WiFi, in comparison to what we had the previous month. Should we give that up to have a better site? Looking back, it wasn’t any one thing that was wrong with the RV park, it was how far we were from family and friends.
We decided to stay put. There were no guarantees that another park would be any better. We wanted to settle in for the month of December. Without a home, we had to try and make our Coffee House a place of comfort. Despite the noise, the construction mess, and the small site, we had good connectivity and good neighbours.
I found being on my bike, being with my thoughts, was relaxing. Jamie unpacked our bicycles from the bed of the truck and we rode to Mission Beach. We rode up the boardwalk at Pacific Beach and remembered how we had longboarded with our daughter along the same path, and how father and daughter had learned to surf together in these waters. By the way, in San Diego, they do call it a boardwalk even though it’s paved. Does that make it a promenade? Sure, but they call it the Mission Beach Boardwalk.
We found a movie theatre and treated ourselves to a new release and popcorn and drinks. The small fortune we dropped on that entertainment was a shock enough in US dollars. We had to add 35% to that! But it was another nice getaway from RV life.
We enjoyed the heat of the day when we had it. We’d read in our camp chairs until the sun hid behind the hills around 3:30 pm. We had to use our furnace at night to stay warm. It was definitely winter temperatures for California. Heavy rains came and kept the humidity levels high in the trailer.
We talked seriously about going back to Vancouver Island for a visit because we felt cramped in our space and we were tired of making decisions about what to do for the next four months.
Laundry, grocery shopping, writing, the life stuff that we all have to do didn’t seem to leave Jamie and I much free time for exploration. We fell into doing the same things to have a routine. We lost the feeling that we had any freedom.
Jamie was trying to make me happy. He realized I was still struggling with the change to our life. I didn’t understand why he was phoning Ralph’s to find out if their underground parking would accommodate our truck. He wanted me to have the convenience of shopping at my favourite grocery store, but we’d been avoiding it because there was never any available street parking. The store is one block from the beach. Unfortunately, the truck wouldn’t have enough clearance to enter the underground parking. We got up extra early on shopping days (when there would be streeting parking available) and walked on the beach before we went to Ralph’s when it opened at 7am.
I now had a steady routine of publishing new content every Thursday. Jamie was still thinking about what he wanted to do. He had been filming and taking photos for A Life Less Burdened, but it would be a few months before he landed on a solid business platform for himself. There was a trade-off for the work we were doing, and the learning, the practice of our craft; we were less active. We had chosen this life. There were growing pains. It was family and friends who reminded us of what we had set out to do.
Dealing with digital clutter is easy if you ignore it. That’s not advice. That’s just what I’d been doing. I’m downsizing slowly. This is a process I have to be diligent about.
I have ups and downs just like everyone else. Some days it’s a challenge not to feel sad. I miss being a part of more people’s lives.
We still have decisions to make. The most significant decision we've had to focus on since leaving our house is where we can find another home base.