New Year’s Revolutions: Moving Around and Thinking Ahead

Our travel updates have been few and far between these last few months. But don’t kid yourself. It’s certainly not due to a lack of interesting stories and events. Quite the opposite in fact.

I spent many hours gathering and chopping firewood. But despite my best efforts, I was not able to keep my family warm through the winter. This had to do with a variety of circumstances between two hosts, first in a neglected hotel and resort in the Spanish Pyrenees, and later on an off-the-grid olive orchard in the Tarragona province. Our struggles with temperature regulation may or may not have been related to our unfortunate bout with what I can only describe as a nasty case of the Spanish influenza. It wasn’t pretty, but we survived, and we’d like to believe that it made us all stronger.

I’m happy to report that the children at least are looking none the worse for wear. We did endure difficult spell in which our daughter spent nearly every waking hour of December and January belting out the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — a chorus, which, I might remind you, consists of one word repeated seven or eight times, with more melody than most 7-year-olds can sustain. It used to be one of our favorite songs. But now, we’ll be quite alright if we don’t hear it again until 2025. Our son also went through a curious phase, in which the expression “What the?!” became his all-purpose, most frequently used phrase. He also keeps asking what country we are in. How can we attribute these bizarre habits and tendencies of children? It’s hard to say.

Meanwhile, though we intend to keep on trucking for another few months, we are thinking more and more about when and where we’d like to wind it down and wrap it up. As stimulating as it is, it’s clear that we cannot maintain this kind of lifestyle forever. Everybody needs a place to call home, and the kids are getting especially eager to zero in on that place. But something tells me it won’t be in the USA, where my wife’s immigration status makes it increasingly difficult for us to put America First.

For her New Year’s resolutions, our 7-year-old daughter said that she wanted to learn to knit, and to find a house. So we asked her if we could visit just three more hosts — Girona, Spain, in February; Auvergne, France, in March; and the Black Forest, Germany, in April. She said OK. And she’s already knitted me my first scarf. It’s my favorite scarf of all time. No exaggeration. Fact. Period.

Following the lowest point thus far on our adventure—when our VW camper van was raided by a gang of thieving banditos who are now walking the streets of Girona with all my old socks and underwear and far more children’s clothing than they could ever need—our spirits sank and we began to question our entire voyage and doubt our chances of ever reaching that promised land we’ve been dreaming of. Even in the best of all possible worlds, the occasional encounter with some Bad Hombres cannot be avoided.

But it was in this darkest of hours that we began to see the light, and the universe reminded us that we were not traveling alone on this far-flung journey. Unable to find a new Work-Away host at the end of January, we got an invitation from one of our most gracious former hostesses, to return to the French village of Osseja at the far end of the fabled Cerdanya valley. Not having to camp out in the VW bus through the dead of winter, we were spared a week of woeful discomfort. And then opportunity started knocking.

First, our off-grid hosts in the olive and almond orchards of Tarragona shared with us the For-Sale Listing of their permaculturally passionate neighbors, who are returning to the UK and selling off their several acres of regenerated ag land for a pittance. It’s certainly an option worth considering, especially for those with the sense of adventure to lead them far away from the public utilities network and into an environment of perennial aridity and oppressively hot summers.

A couple days later we received a most tempting proposition from another former host, inviting us to buy into their 35-acre mountain property with its untended hotel and resort and naturally healing mineral waters on the picturesque slopes of Cerdanya, among the Spanish Pyrenees. Between the hotel, restaurant and hot springs, the possibilities here—from community building to retreat hosting—are literally unlimited. We already have huge plans to rebuild the entire facility, and make Mexico pay for it.

As we began to weigh our options, wondering how, if and where we would ever fulfill that dream of building our own Earth Ship (an entirely self-sustaining and maximally efficient home, incorporating elements of water recycling, renewable energy, underground insulation and passive solar design), in came a message from an even earlier host, back in the Styria wine country of lower Austria. Basically, she suggested that we wrap up our tour and “come home.” They already have plans, she told us, to start building an Earth Ship on the steep hillside above their vegetable patch. Cosmic.

With all of this, we truly have something to contemplate. It’s forced us already to start thinking seriously about our real priorities. Is it more important to be close to an international airport, or to have easy access to clean drinking water? Is it better to live among a beautiful landscape of green forests and snow capped mountains, or to have ready access to locally grown organic produce? Would we rather live among a socially and emotionally supportive community in the hinterlands, or in the culturally and intellectually stimulating surroundings of a historic European city with its cobbled streets and majestic opera houses?

So many choices. So many questions. For now, all I can say is that we have some really smart people working on this. They have no experience, but as their parents, we can assure you that they are some really really smart people. One of them even knows how to read.