Is This Cheating?

I’m currently staying with friends in the Bay Area (San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland) of California. After driving across the country, coast to coast, and staying in some pretty primative camping situations, I’m now living in the lap of luxury for a couple weeks. I was SO excited to get here, primarily to see my friends again, but also to have a place where I could do laundry, take some long, hot showers, clean out my van, borrow a vaccuum, and do some much needed housekeeping.

I’m parked in front of their home nearBefore Berkeley, and it slopes in two directions, so the propane fridge won’t work (isn’t functional unless it’s level) and it would be very uncomfortable to sleep with my head going downhill.  Fortunately, my friends have a large, exquisite guest suite and have offered it to me and Cosmo for the time we’re here. We gladly accepted.

I discovered the first night that I have whatever the opposite of “claustrophobic” is.  It’s not agoraphobia, because I love being outside. But being inside in a large bedroom or a bathroom that is bigger than my van made me feel…?  I don’t know what it made me feel. The first word that came to mind was “cheating.”  Before embarking on this journey, I pared down, got rid of so many items, and have been living in a tiny metal box on wheels for almost a year now. My world is the entire continental U.S., but my home is this 80 square feet, and what can fit comfortably in it. I’ve become very much a minimalist.  And that somehow causes a mental conflict when I have access to a huge home in the hills of Berkeley. I have a shelf in their refrigerator to store my food items that is bigger than the entire refrigerator in my van;  I’m sleeping in a bed that would take up half of my van.  We’ve often gone out to a restaurant for a meal.  While on the road, I have gotten take-out a couple times, but never ate in a restaurant. And when we “eat in” we go to the grocery store or farmer’s market and get a ton of ingredients to prepare the meal, and have many pots, pans and kitchen utensils to choose from. My friend Tom usually makes us a drink before dinner.  It all feels very over-the-top luxurious. We even went for a pedicure (which was not so much a luxury as a necessity–my feet were so bad from wearing flip-flops on the road and camping that they looked like they belonged to a troll living under some remote bridge. They are now back to looking like human feet again.)

I’ve now adjusted to enjoying it while it lasts, as I enjoyed camping along a beautiful lake or river, knowing that this is where I live for NOW, and soon I’ll go back to boondocking, maybe by a river, maybe in a forest, maybe in Walmart parking lot. This is just part of where and how I live now. It won’t be this way for long, but it is this way for now, and I should make the most of it

So thanks Tom and Greg for being such gracious hosts and for making Cosmo and I feel so at home. I’ll enjoy all the luxuries of living here until I move on to the next stop.