{"id":352,"date":"2006-09-18T23:21:55","date_gmt":"2006-09-19T03:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/?p=352"},"modified":"2006-09-18T23:21:55","modified_gmt":"2006-09-19T03:21:55","slug":"right-sizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/?p=352","title":{"rendered":"Right-Sizing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I think the logic goes like this:  If you don&#8217;t have a house, and you don&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>Actually, what we are doing is &#8220;right-sizing&#8221; our life.  The big house and many possessions aren&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>So we really do have a master plan. It evolves as we learn more about what we need and don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;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&#8217;s a tall order, which is why we will spend another year working it out.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;t buying.  I did manage to get $25 for a box of paperback mysteries and sci-fi books, but the good stuff &#8212; over 50 hardcovers &#8212; will support the library in its book sale this October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}