Recently, my husband responded to an open question on Twitter asking: Why do you live where you live - not what type of house, but geographically, why do you live there?

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For most people, they live where they were planted by family and life circumstances. There are a select few who voluntarily uproot and either move permanently to a new region or choose to travel full-time and refuse permanence. We are somewhere in the middle. That's what we have really learned in the last year or so. For the majority of our marriage, we have wanted to travel and potentially uproot.

Born and raised in Ohio, both Alex and I have never felt fully satisfied by what life presented to us back in Ohio. I managed to get out and live in Chicago for a time, he Pittsburgh, but then we both got pulled back to Ohio, found each other, and almost immediately moved in together an hour away from "home". Since then it's been a steady progression of life and making choices that would allow us the freedom to leave- mainly employment choices and income considerations. It's been a really long 10 years of living and learning.

Well, we all know where we ended up. On the road, living in a camper with our two boys and three pets. We are presently parked in Taos, New Mexico and we have news - we aren't leaving. Well, we found the place we feel at home and we are going to be setting down roots here. Ohioans, no more! So, let me walk through how and why we are choosing to live here.

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When we left Ohio, we didn't know for sure what we wanted from the place we would eventually call our home, we just heavily suspected it would not be in Ohio. The only things we did know were we wanted land and the ability to potentially mini-homestead. Prior to RV life we visited New England several times and really fell in love with that area. But, we worried about the winters- we don't like Ohio winter, and New England is not for the faint of heart. New England also as it turns out is pretty darn expensive- and while we aren't Scrooge level of tightfisted we understand the value of our income and recognize when it is being expended thoughtfully. At the end of our analysis, we concluded that we really loved the areas we visited because they were very progressive- solar panels on practically every roof, a lot of colleges and universities brimming with idealistic youth, strong recycling programs, openness and acceptance of difference... yadda yadda. It was blue, and it felt hospitable and community oriented.

First Bullet point identified: Community.

We also visited Texas in May of 2019 and found it to be quite lovely. We were fascinated by the differences between the north and the south- the live oaks and evergreens, the granite rocks, the low humidity, the open skies, and the rugged nature of a more heated environment. We considered it a real possibility and were absolutely flummoxed because how could we be considering two completely contradictory areas of the country. We wished for the community of the north and the environment of the south. We also wondered, would we miss the snow during holiday seasons?

Bullet point two: Warm weather &amp; low humidity.

Well, the next step for us was actually the shift into RV life. We had baby Devin in August 2019, and we were in a rental house until June of 2020. In December 2019 we got our camper. With the new baby, and Ben in local preschool we were actually getting into a deep enough groove that our desperation over not knowing how to choose between the north and the south left us at a loss and resigned to possibly never leaving Ohio because we just didn't know what to do with the limited information we had. We envisioned a house, trying to get more into the local community, and having the camper as an escape. But, then my brain fog from lack of sleep started to lift shortly after we got the camper and in January I made the proposition to take our show on the road and find home. Obviously, that's what then followed. We needed more first hand experience in this country and time analyzing what we wanted from home in order to make a well-informed decision. At that point we had an honest confrontation with ourselves, our desires, and the numbing drug that is complacency and we decided we did in fact want to leave Ohio. Our conclusion was: if Alex's employment is 100% remote work, why would we want to stay within an hour of where we were born if we didn't have to? I would take it further and say we wanted to know why we would/ would not choose Ohio when faced with 49 other options.

I think I have <a href="/articles/blog-posts/this-is-not-a-vacation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">written before </a>about the difficulty in communicating to friends and family that we weren't going to get tired of traveling full-time because it wasn't just "a vacation," we aren't on sabbatical or something. We were simply taking daily life and putting wheels under it. We did and we still are doing that. There is rarely a day or week that passes where Alex and I don't reflect in some way on the journey we have undertaken, what we have learned from it, and how it's changing us and leading us into the next phase of life. We process it, a lot, mostly because there's a lot to process.

Everywhere we go we ask ourselves: Could we live here? Does this community feel right to us? Do we like the weather? Do we like the landscape or will we get tired of it? Do we like the recreational activities? How far are we from a major city? How far are we from other places we might want to visit? How high is the cost of living? Is the state restrictive for homeschooling? Is the state receptive to green living and homesteading? Does it feel right here in a completely subjective and intuitional way? What do we like or dislike and why? We were building more criteria based on a desire to find home. Also after spending a lot of time living and traveling we even questioned if full-time traveling would be a better fit than rooting down somewhere?

Bullet points 3-6: Rural/suburban mix, Low cost of living, Progressive values, Homeschooling friendly

Many places we visited we said, "I could live here," on first glance, but after peeling back some layers were able to pick apart the other variables and conclude... nah, this isn't where I want to be. Georgia, Texas, New York, Northern California, and Southern Oregon were all respectively lovely places that felt very similar on the surface. A lot of rural land, a lot of conservatism, and pretty moderate weather- although some had hot hot summers and others had cold cold winters. They mostly felt like Ohio to us, and it therefore was a wrong fit because we wanted out of Ohio and the way it felt.

We found pretty quickly, that big forests weren't as important to us as we thought they would be because we missed the forest for all of the trees- it was too closed in. A cabin in the woods is fun to visit, but it's hard for us to fall passionately in love with our environment when we don't get a good view of it. We recognized instead a deep love and appreciation for mountain views- particularly rugged mountains rather than treed ones. We love the shapes they form and the way the light changes them throughout the day. Mountain sunsets are a majesty to behold, and I would personally choose them over any other landscape.

Over time we also came to realize that in order to have our low humidity and warm air we were pretty restricted to the southwest, and that means hot hot summers. So, how could were find a way to finagle that into something that "works for us"? Our answer was find a place to live that allows specific seasonal desires to become easy destinations for travel part of the year. We love our life on the road for many reasons, so it isn't a hard sell for us to live in a place that encourages us to get out and travel, because we usually want to anyhow... I mean for goodness sake, our wedding song was "All I Can See" by Brendan James. We committed to each other and to a very specific approach to life the day we got married. The chorus is:

The revolution of the earth around the sun is the perfect lesson of how it should be. So if i can I'll learn to journey and return, to never rest till I've seen all I can see...

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Bullet point 8: Location well situated for road trips

So, I will be completely honest when we got to this point, we recognized that we had enough bullet points and experiences to try to make a call. We loved Kernville, California. It was southwest, mountainous, near Sequoia National Forest, an hour from Bakersfield, 3 hours from the ocean, 2 hours from snow-capped peaks, and inexpensive. What it was not: progressive. That killed community and receptivity of to the green, off-grid living we were looking for- and those points we realized quickly were much more important than we previously thought. We didn't want to uproot to the opposite side of the country (beautiful though it was) and set up our lives still never feeling like we fit in to the community.

Once we came to that conclusion we had one thought- We need to visit Taos, New Mexico, and that's why we sprinted here over the course of a week. We loved central NM when we spent a week there in March. We got a real sense of the type of people in New Mexico, we learned about some of their green initiatives, they are homeschooling friendly, different regions in the state are practically different planets for how diverse the ecosystems are, the land is pretty cheap and rugged with a lot of variety including our mountains, and it's also a good central point in the country while remaining in the southwest region. We have access to the majority of national parks within a couple of days of driving, and it is significantly less distance to visit family in Ohio than if we were in SoCal or Texas for instance. It also just has an indescribable quality to it that we sensed during our first visit. It's the 5th largest state and 35th for population. It isn't a super wealthy state and given the harsh climate across most of it, it is a state that looks pretty rough around the edges at a glance. But, when you sit with it, it's also something more that not everyone can see or feel- there's a reason the state motto is "The Land of Enchantment." I recently read,

There are two ways to become a New Mexican, according to Oliver La Farge: by birth or by passionate adoption. ... New Mexico had simply seeped into my soul. The process was subtle, a series of shadings, of discoveries, that coalesced one day into the thought that has anchored my feelings about New Mexico for years now: I don't want to leave this place.

That quote particularly struck me because just days before I read it we drove into Taos and I went into the grocery store. I left the boys in the car, and walked around and just felt the tone of the people around me, saw what the store offered, and just kind of absorbed "this could be my local store, how would that feel? When I sat back down in the car I looked at Alex with tears welling in my eyes and said, "Don't ever make me leave." We had a brief exchange where he smiled and inquired why, and then said, "I feel it too, this place is special." I don't think either of us have ever been so certain of a decision since we got together as a couple. When things are right, they are just right.

So, how did we get to Taos you might ask? Well, we hadn't seen northern New Mexico at all, and we felt pretty strongly that New Mexico was going to hold our future home, we just weren't 100% certain where. Also, it is where the <a href="https://earthshipbiotecture.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Earthship Biotecture Community</a> is based. If you haven't heard of this, it's a community of off-grid, self-sustaining, environmentally conscious homes. They are built using a lot of recyclable materials, they collect rainwater for home use and eliminate the need for a well, they have interior gardens that grow year round and provide food, they run on solar power (sometimes wind, and some people choose to supplement with propane too for stoves and such), they use thermodynamics to control the interior temperature by earth-berming the north side of the house and having a wall of greenhouse on the south face, they recycle their own water thorough 3-4 uses, and have a non-traditional septic system that basically feeds an outdoor green space. These houses have been built, developed, and tweaked in Taos since the 70's and are being built around the world to encourage sustainable building practices that work with the environment. There's a lot more to them, but in general we were interested in seeing them first hand and the community that would welcome such alternative approaches to living. It was time to see it for ourselves and get a feel for this (hippie) community that seemed so aligned with our interests.

No surprises, but Northern New Mexico is just as beautiful as the central and southern part, with a few interesting differences. This region includes the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains, and the town is at an elevation of 6,969 feet which means the summers are less intense than they are in the south, and it also snows here in the winter. Alex is thrilled because he always imagined living in Colorado, but it just isn't super affordable there. We are currently in a RV community in the mountains at 8200 ft where we are surrounded by aspens and alpines, lakes, and agricultural land. In 30 minutes we can be in the heart of Taos where the street banners read: "Taos is Art" and there are many delicious restaurants, quirky shops, tons of art galleries, museums, and adobe buildings everywhere. It is a charming, progressive, and still pretty small town of only about 6,000 residents. There's a big ski-ing community here and a ton of backpackers, and because it's New Mexico there's a lot of public federal lands and opportunities to explore the truly insane range of wildlife.

It's just the right fit for us. We have found land, not our long-term land (more than likely because it's just 1/2 an acre), but land nonetheless that is inexpensive enough to justify purchasing it and parking our RV on it when we leave this campground. We are going off-grid with it and are going to set up some systems that support off-grid living from the camper. We are also still straightening out our long-term plans, but as of this moment we intend to purchase a tiny house and have it parked on the land to operate out of as our home base while we test out the off-grid life and save for the bigger piece of land we have our eyes on. The camper is fine, but she isn't all-season, and as I mentioned, winter is a thing here. So, we are going to get something that can house us here all year if we want, and leave us the freedom to hitch up the camper and high-tail out if we get "the go-yonders" (a phrase our delightful neighbor down in Elephant Butte, NM taught us). There's still plenty of travel we want to do and things we would love to see, and I'm sure we will. But right now, it feels right to stake a claim and have at the very least a base camp to operate from out here. (Not to mention this summer is already shaping up to be insane for camping in an almost-post-Covid America.)

We will get a chance to hold still, to feel like part of the community, and to explore some of the things we believe are most important to us. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and we will pick up and move on, but I suspect it will work out. If it does work out, we plan to get that bigger plot of land, move the tiny house onto it, and then reassess- are we tiny house people, or do we want to build our own house. We sort of expect to build, but at the same time I know the idea of a larger house and the upkeep of it makes me a little queasy. A lot of people might think a camper is not enough space, but we are really happy with the space we have at approximately 208 sq ft and the tiny home on our radar is a whopping 352 sq ft. So, only time will tell if we will make the leap to living in a larger house (without wheels under it).

But, that's where we are. We found what we were looking for, at least we think we did. We are really excited to continue moving forward and seeing where this crazy life takes us. I think it will be really nice to be able to travel for fun and not just to escape home the way we did back in Ohio. It will be a really refreshing change of pace to take a vacation and be excited to return home, and I really don't think we could ask for more than that. Travel is a part of our family now, but having a comfortable place to land is going to be valuable to us in many ways.

So why do we live here? Short answer: because the lifestyle available to us in this place is in alignment with our values and our goals.

Community- a cohesive sense of shared values

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Warm weather &amp; low humidity- southwest climate, but with a little elevation to take the edge off

Rural/suburban mix- a small, but bustling town area that provides "somewhere to go" when needed

Low cost of living- inexpensive land and openness to a variety of green building practices that curb expenses

Progressive values- innovation and openness to different people, experiences, and questions about how to live life well

Homeschooling friendly- no stringent restrictions or rules regarding testing and "normal" approaches to schooling

(Rugged) Mountain views- gorgeous mountains, endless sunsets, open fields of sage to watch the weather roll through and the night sky come alive every night

Location well situated for road trips- east of the majority of national parks and west of friends and family

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high desert landscape in panoramic orientation depicting mountains in the distance and sage brush on miles of visible land

A Safe Harbor

Building a Set of Criteria

First Bullet point identified: Community.

Bullet point two: Warm weather & low humidity.

Every Mile is a Lesson Learned

Bullet points 3-6: Rural/suburban mix, Low cost of living, Progressive values, Homeschooling friendly

Bullet point 7: (Rugged) Mountain views

Bullet point 8: Location well situated for road trips

Choices, Choices

It Feels Like Home to Me