Where is Your Home Base?

            I'm now almost five months into this adventure of having no home but the one I travel in.  Though, if I’m being honest I've not done much traveling in it!  But I know I can and what each place I have visited and stayed in has in common is that none are my home base.  The trailer is my home and it is the base of my current living, but I have come to realize it is not my home base in the truest sense.

            When I was about half the age I am now I spent several months traveling around Europe with a backpack.  The one thing I took away was the idea that I missed having a place to call home.  Of course that was in the days of no cell phones or internet, so it's hard to compare to now!

            But I remember I grew tired of saying good bye to friends and never really knowing where I would be or for how long.  But I also liked the adventure of it all and the freedom to get away from whomever I didn't want to be with.  I once spent all night in a remote train station to get away from some guy whose name I don't remember but I do remember I did NOT want to travel with him any more!

            Part of this experiment was to see if the trailer and the animals would be enough of a home base to allow me to continue to travel without feeling like I was missing something.  However, as I close in on a new year I'm starting to feel like I want to find a place to call home - even if it is temporary.

            Home base means to me having a place to return to where everyone knows your name as the Cheers crowd did in the sitcom so many years ago.  It means having a place your mail goes so you're not chasing it from city to city.  It means having friends that you spend more time saying hello to than good bye to.  It also means having an anchor of sorts that you can return to when you need that time away from the unknown and return to the known.

            I'm starting to tire of telling my story to stranger after stranger until we become friends.  Where did you come from?  Why did you leave California?  What are your plans?  The same questions from city to city and person to person are becoming tiresome as the basis of every conversation I seem to have.  And then just when those conversations seem to be over I am off to a new place with new people, yet I'm having the same conversations again and again.

            I don't know where my new home base will be.  My intention is to stay in New Mexico so I am starting to look around.  I know it won't be where I am, but I also think it won't be too far from here either.  It isn't to say I won't keep traveling or looking, but for now I am feeling the call of having a place I call home, even if I don't live there full time.

            I still believe your home is where your heart is and for me, the trailer with the animals is my home and I am happy in it.  But I am also looking forward to extending my heart beyond these walls to a community I too can call home.  All suggestions are welcome and we will see where this next leg of the journey goes!