6 months on the road – where has the time gone???

Wow – we’ve been living in our little world (100 sq ft) for 6 months. Time has flown by and I can’t believe that we will be back home in only two months… It seems quite surreal at the moment.

I can also envision this loud ticking clock that is counting down our remaining days. But that kind of thinking infers that we are counting down towards the end of something. What if this is just the beginning of the adventure and more is to come once we get home? We are already talking about a summer filled with kayaking and biking and how paddling season will be so much better this year because we can go when the water is there and take school with us rather than working around school and work schedules. And then there’s next year…

So – 6 months on the road, where is our thinking? What have we learned? What observations do we have?

• patience is a wonderful virtue that we have all gained some more off – learning not to react to every situation and give the benefit of the doubt to the other if they react in a certain way or make a snarky comment. Knock on wood we have not had a single blow-up, by any of us, in 6 months.
• You really don’t need very much stuff to get through every day – clothes, toys etc. We have many things that we packed thinking we couldn’t do without them and they haven’t been touched yet (and imagine how much stuff we left behind…)
• Time is the biggest gift you can get and family is a wonderful place to spend it. We have ended up spending close to 10 weeks with or around extended family and it has been wonderful to have this time, especially when we live so far away from everyone
• Diesel gas and reliable internet are two things that are not easy to find and should not be taken for granted! Clean showers and recycling are the other things that should be maximized when you find them…
• We did not end up boondocking (staying in the middle of no where with no services) as much as we had originally envisioned due to a mix of weather (cold, rain, yuck) and the locations we were hitting. We spent more time in urban and somewhat urban locations for school experiences than we normally would in our adventure style.
• Roadschooling is fabulous. I love how much opportunity is out there to bring learning to life. We have learned so many things, by taking advantage of situations that just present themselves, that we wouldn’t have had in a traditional classroom.

We are moving forward with a sense of certainty that we are going to slow down and simplify. We can’t tell you exactly what this means, other than knowing it includes less work and more adventure time together. We don’t yet have answers to “where” and “what” but we do have the comfort and confidence that we will figure it out as we go. At the moment we’re taking one month at a time and one decision at a time, knowing that anything is possible and it’s just up to us to choose what makes the most sense for us.