Comments from a few friends of mine recently have made me realize that people often get the wrong impression of what we are doing. Seeing us downsizing to a trailer, giving away personal possessions, and extolling the virtues of a mobile life, people think we are dropping out of society.

I think the logic goes like this: If you don’t have a house, and you don’t have a lot of stuff, and you roam the country, and you homeschool, you must be rejecting society and working to become some sort of combination hippie / Unabomber. All we need now is to take the wheels off the Airstream and find a spot in Montana to park it forever, eh?

Actually, what we are doing is “right-sizing” our life. The big house and many possessions aren’t happiness, for us. Neither is living in a trailer park somewhere. The right balance is somewhere in between. Exploring the country in a fully mobile fashion with only 200 square feet of space takes us to the opposite extreme of where we were a few years ago, and thus we can weigh the benefits of each mode of life and decide what we ultimately want to settle on.

So we really do have a master plan. It evolves as we learn more about what we need and don’t need. Our travel adventure has become an essential part of the process of figuring it out. Full-time travel is wonderful and it works for many people for years, but in our case we expect to end the full-time segment in the next year or so.

We’re already scouting for places to call home for at least six months of the year, and give all of us the benefits of a local community while keeping our option to travel open. That’s a tall order, which is why we will spend another year working it out.

Today’s developments: Eleanor got her semi-annual allergy checkup and it was generally good news. [One tidbit: Zyrtec is available over the counter in generic form in Canada. Guess where we’ll be going soon?] Afterward, she slaved another day at the storage unit, offloading a carfull of stuff on a friend and generating another box of trash. Meanwhile, I ended up donating six boxes of books to a local library, since the used-book buyers in the area weren’t buying. I did manage to get $25 for a box of paperback mysteries and sci-fi books, but the good stuff — over 50 hardcovers — will support the library in its book sale this October.