The Tank Is Half Full
“Can’t I just sleep until March 31st?” Jamie asked.
The end of 2018; a year of major change. We questioned how we were going to get through three more months of living on the road. We finished off the turkey on Boxing Day (December 26th). How were we going to make 2019 better?
We hadn’t made the final decision of where we wanted to live. We endeavoured to see our tank half full, not half empty. We hadn’t been to a gas station to fill the truck with gas in six weeks! The walking and biking meant there was something to celebrate.
No matter where we went in North America, we had no control over the amount of daylight at the end of December. The days were short. The wind was cool. There was frost overnight. When the sun warmed up the pad we were parked on in San Diego, we did our laundry and read our books.
I tried to keep the clutter under control in our small space. It was very easy to collect things. Jamie liked the glass milk bottles he’d found in Phoenix. I had a jar full of tea. I wasn’t drinking any then, but I would crave again soon. These items were easy to tuck into a cupboard. It was the laundry bag at the end of the bed, and the portable washer sitting in the corner of the dinette, and the drying rack for clothes we brought inside to keep out of the rain, that was the stuff crowding us. The counters were full. Boxes of cereal, loaves of bread, and bowls of fruit had nowhere else to go. Laptops would go from table to bed, bed to table.
We crawled into the “bedroom” to end the day. No ball drop, no party, just a kiss.
Counting down …. 3 …. 2 …. 1….
This was the end of 2018. Not the bang we had put our bucks towards, but the year came to a close with us marking our calendars in March. That’s when we’d come out of our hibernation.
We’re going to share with you what the first seven weeks of 2019 were like. Every house and town we considered, every step we took that got us back to Canada. That’s where A Life Less Burdened goes next.
When there were RVs in all of the spots around us, we felt less exposed. We couldn’t lay claim to being the smallest trailer in the park, but we were certainly dwarfed by the larger 5th wheels and motorhomes around us. Think of the tank as half full, the more neighbours we had, the more shelter there was from the wind and the rain.
The beach was definitely my favourite place to walk at sunrise. I can still hear those big waves in December crashing at our feet.
We perfected our dishwashing station. Using a simple black plastic bin to collect dirty dishes on the right, I would wash, rinse, and hand them over to the left where Jamie would dry them. He couldn’t put them away because where I stood at the sink I was right in front of the cabinets where most of our dishes were stored. It was a bit of a dance. A “Gangnam Style’ mash-up.