Home

Home can be defined as the place where one lives permanently. Or perhaps not.

Lorraine and I have had the good fortune to travel all across North America and much of Europe. And we travel light. On our extended trips to Europe, we travelled with one small bag each for our clothing, and one small bag each for our cameras, smartphones, and computers. We discovered that we needed very little in the way of things when we travelled. We had a sense of freedom, of being able to discover the world around us without worrying about the stuff left behind in our hotel room. But then again, we always returned home. Home to a big house filled with lots of stuff.

Creature comforts.

How much stuff? The short answer: way too much stuff.

We have made a few attempts to get rid of a lot of the stuff in our house. We have purged our clothing, given away some of the junk that we had crammed into a large storage area in our basement, and we have certainly tamed down our tendency to buy things on impulse.

We are finding that as we near retirement, there is a penalty that you have to pay with owning too much stuff, a penalty of obligation, a penalty of being tied down. We are discovering that we do not own our stuff, our stuff really owns us. Our house is part of that problem. A large house affords more opportunity to buy and hold a lot of stuff. We have filled our house with stuff.

Our coach has everything we need to live and arguably more. The limited space in the coach acts as a regulator in terms of how many things we need to bring along to be self sufficient for days, weeks or even months on end. Less space, less stuff.

We are downsizing. Our house is for sale. We are going through another purge. I have been reading extensively in the area of minimalism, trying to learn about the principles for a simpler way of living in a country where we have so much ability to consume.

Our plan once the house has sold is to find a small parcel of land for our coach and to build a smaller house, probably less than 1,000 square feet. We have about 7,000 square feet in our current house.

As the coach goes into storage for the winter later this week, I will be posting more about this part of our journey, how we are downsizing and how we are getting ready to retire. I will post on what we have been learning about the minimalist lifestyle, and how we are getting ourselves ready to go out on the road in our coach. And, of course, I will continue to post about our travels and our discoveries in the RV world generally.