When I began my trip I wasn’t sure what it would bring. My goals were few, but significant: I wanted to get away from a couple months of winter in Minnesota; I wanted to get out of my usual routines; and I hoped to try to start writing for myself again.
I think I achieved all of those goals, and wildly exceeded the most important one to me, which was the writing. I haven’t written for myself—that is, just sat down to write with no real reason beyond entertaining myself or thinking on paper—for more than a decade, aside from a few poems here and there. But on this trip I wrote more than 30,000 words, which amounts to about 60 pages of a digital word document, single spaced (calling out this stat probably tells you something about me). That’s pretty good, even if the writing was mostly just journaling about my experiences. To me, it feels like a big accomplishment, and I’ll take it as a first step toward writing more consistently.
Truthfully, I always wanted to be a writer, but I never put in the real work. I’ve been stymied by self-doubt mostly, a fear of failure significant enough that I couldn’t get started or I sabotaged myself when I did get something going. I did all the asides that my favorite writers did (lots of drugs and booze), but I skipped the writing, and pretty soon a decade or more had gone by. But I don’t want to look back on my life in 20 or 40 years and say I didn’t try because I was afraid of failing. And I’m getting old enough that when I look to the future it always comes with a glance back over the shoulder; a realization that there’s more behind me than ahead, at least as far as the literal human lifespan is concerned. So, I went on this adventure to start to try again, and I think it worked. I hope I can keep it up.
Here are some other stats from the trip:
I averaged $37 a night for camping (about $2,000)
I drove more than 5,400 miles
I averaged 12.8 miles per gallon
I spent about $1,300 on gas (gas was about $3.20 average)
I was gone 64 nights total
I wrote more than 33,000 words
I took about 80 hours of vacay for driving and leisure
The only way around the gas is to get a smaller camper and vehicle to improve your mileage, but any smaller and I think I would have felt too smashed. You could also move less, but moving was kind of the point. Gas consistently under $3 a gallon would have been nice, but geopolitical global conflict and decades-long dogged resistance to renewable energy being what it is, you work within the perimeters of what you’ve got.
I also stayed at some really nice campgrounds, some right on the beach, and they don’t come cheap, even at state parks. Some were $65 a night. But I tempered that with lots of nights at national forests, where, with an America the Beautiful annual pass ($80), you can get a solid discount and drop your stay from around $20 a night to $12. My average nightly stay was $37 in the end for those 52 nights in the camper.
I’d expect that if a person wanted to essentially do what I did but didn’t need campgrounds with particular attributes (low tree coverage to ensure Starlink satellite wifi for working), you could probably keep that average under $20 a night pretty easily. So, for sure you could camp indefinitely for about $700 a month, and that includes electricity and water/showers. That’s cheaper than you can live in a city, and your views are a lot better, too.
I think one of the biggest takeaways from this trip for me is that you can get yourself out of a psychological situation through physical action. Namely, if you have some habits you want to break, like sitting around your house watching TV too much, and doing the same thing every day, like working, eating, sleeping, TVing, repeat; maybe try just getting in your car and driving away to someplace where that stuff isn’t. Extract yourself physically and then begin to extract yourself mentally, while building up a new mentality that can stay intact upon your return. But what do I know? I’ve been alive long enough to know that it’s probably not a good idea to take my advice.
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