Most Days Aren't Yosemite
If you follow us online, it would be completely reasonable to assume that we spend most of our lives standing in front of something spectacular. A national park. A mountain. The Pacific Ocean. A waterfall. A ridiculously beautiful sunset somewhere in the desert. There is usually a hiking trail involved, occasionally a lighthouse, and an alarming number of photographs in which one or both of us are staring thoughtfully into the distance as though we've just discovered the meaning of life.
We understand how that happens. Those are the moments we photograph. They're the days that become YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and the stories we tell when someone asks where we've been. Nobody sees a picture of Yosemite Valley and wonders why we bothered taking it. There are considerably fewer photographs of us doing laundry, sitting in front of our computers for six hours, or wandering around Walmart trying to remember what we came in for.
The truth is that after four years of traveling full-time, most of our days aren't Yosemite.
Most of our days are remarkably ordinary.
We wake up, and Jon takes Ranger out while I start moving toward whatever the day requires of me, usually with coffee involved fairly early in the process. We check email. We work. There are groceries to buy, dishes to wash, laundry to do, prescriptions to pick up, packages to track down, bills to pay, phone calls to make, meals to figure out, and an RV that remains stubbornly committed to requiring the same basic household maintenance no matter how impressive the scenery outside happens to be. Some days we're working on Trail & Ember. Some days we're editing a video or staring at YouTube analytics. Some days we're dealing with whatever decided to stop working in the RV. Sometimes all of those things happen on the same day.
That's one of the stranger things about living this way. We can wake up in a place someone else has spent months planning a vacation to visit, look outside at scenery we've never seen before, and then spend most of the day sitting at our computers. By late afternoon I may realize I've barely been outside, while Jon's primary excursions have been taking Ranger for his walks, despite the fact that there is a national park twenty minutes away.
People occasionally tell us, “You guys are always doing something.”
We aren't. We're just much less likely to post a photograph captioned, Spent most of today answering emails, edited for four hours, went to Walmart, made dinner, watched TV, went to bed.
Although that would be considerably more representative.
For people who don't live this way, we understand why full-time travel can look like a very long vacation. We move from destination to destination, so it seems logical that each new place begins another little vacation. Except the things most people temporarily leave behind when they go on vacation came with us. We still work remotely. We run Trail & Ember. We make YouTube videos. We talk to our family. We take care of Ranger. We pay bills, make appointments, clean the RV, buy groceries, and perform the increasingly complicated full-time-RVer ritual of figuring out where an online order can be delivered when we may not be in the same place by the time it arrives.
The fact that our backyard happens to be spectacular this week doesn't make any of those things disappear.
In our first year on the road, though, we probably bought into the vacation idea a little ourselves. We'd gotten ourselves all the way to some incredible place, so surely we should be out doing something. There were trails to hike, scenic drives to take, visitor centers to explore, towns to walk around, restaurants to try, overlooks to photograph, and an entire internet full of lists explaining the seventeen things we absolutely could not miss before leaving.
There is nothing quite like choosing a life because you want more freedom and then feeling vaguely guilty because you haven't made it to Scenic Overlook Number Four.
