Leaving Home, now Home-on-Wheels

Right now, I’m sitting in the van. Outside, it’s pitch black; I can see more stars than in the light-polluted suburbs. Here and there, campfires are blazing. Dear neighbors, I cannot hear a single plane.

So, the day has finally arrived: we have moved out of our home and into a van.

It began in the same way that many of the days in the last few weeks had begun, with frantic organizing and packing. This morning, I had been trying to put everything into the van in a logical and methodical way. Now, in the last minutes before we had to leave — the buyers were signing their papers at 11 am; already their agent had given us an ultimatum that we had to be out of the house by 11:30 am — we just threw everything inside the aisle of the van, which quickly looked like a hoarder’s dream.

One neighbor stopped by with good wishes and the biggest can of hot cocoa I have ever seen. Another stopped by while we were filling our water tank. We will miss the many kind people in this community.

We arrived at Matthews Arm Campground at Shenandoah National Park and promptly went about demonstrating our newbie-ness by damaging the van’s running board while trying to use the levelers; the doggone things got wedged into the frame of the van. Sigh…

We managed to put our stuff in some semblance of order — and we discovered our van actually does have an aisle! Ah, that’s better!