vanlife – Pamela Helberg

B is for Bodhi

Published on April 3, 2023 by Pam15 Comments

When I sold my home and bought a van in late 2021, my primary mission was to minimize my responsibilities. I’d shucked my mortgage and utility bills, given away my lawnmower, and stuffed my storage unit. I looked forward to an unfettered future—just me, my van, and my mountain bike.

Indeed, for a few months things unfolded pretty much as I envisioned. I chased a girl to Austin, bought a #vanlife van, and moved in, never imagining that I would soon have a four-legged traveling companion. Not to be cold-hearted, but my kids were both launched and my old old cats had finally died (RIP Kai and Mittens, truly, we loved you), and my mother was safely in the care of Brookdale and my brother. The open road beckoned.

There’s no cut and dried way to explain how Bodhi ended up a #vandog, how I ended up with a dog in my van, but here we are, counting down to nearly a year together in June. Long story long: I met a woman on Match.com early in the pandemic. She had just rescued a Mexican street dog she named Bodhi. I fell in love with that dog, and even when the woman dumped me, I pined for Bodhi.

Bodhi is the perfect dog. He’s indifferent to food. He could care less what I’m eating and rarely, if ever, begs. He’s low-key, not jumpy, not barky, certainly not yippy. He’s loyal and loving, and though he can be incorrigibly needy at times, he can also be independent. He is as cute as a button and unimaginably personable.

I went on Match.com and fell for a dog. Unfortunately, the dog’s owner and I did not part as friends, and when she went away, so did Bodhi. Then, fast forward two years to last June, and quite by accident, I discovered that Bodhi’s owner had recently fallen seriously ill, and, upon reaching out to a mutual friend, I learned she was not expected to live.

I asked after Bodhi. “Where is he?” “Is he going to be okay? Are you guys keeping him?” I figured our mutual friend would keep him—they already had one dog and two kids who knew Bodhi well. I just wanted to make sure he would be well-cared for.

“Do you want him?” she asked, laughing as if she in no way expected me to say yes.

“Yes!” I said without even hesitating. Not a second to contemplate how I had just complicated my life. “Yes. I want him.”

“Seriously? But you just sold your house to live in a van!”

“Yeah, but I love that damn dog! Where is he? When can I get him?”

Reader, I picked him up that very afternoon in June, and he has been with me ever since (except for a few weeks here and there when I just couldn’t have him with me). In fact—he’s the reason I ended up going to Mexico, now that I think about it. Had I not left him behind with my friend and her dog, she of the wine-addled international travel planning in my previous post, I probably would not have spent the past three months in Mexico).

Life sure takes some interesting turns, doesn’t it?

A is for Adios Amigas!

Published on April 3, 2023 by Pam2 Comments

Last summer, after a couple of bottles of wine, and addled by the summer sun, a friend and I decided it would be a great idea to spend the winter in Mexico. She had spent six weeks the previous winter on the Caribbean side in Porto Morales, and I had spent several short vacations north of Puerto Vallarta over the last decade visiting my father in Rincon Guayabitos. We both knew we’d rather walk our dogs on the beaches than in the snow and rain.

Initially we thought we would drive my van down, meeting up in Austin (where I had spent November and December), and departing from there, winding our way to the Nayarit Riviera. Our friends and families, however, had strong opinions about why that might not be a good idea:

“That van would make a nice cartel drug van!” “Two old ladies alone in a nice van? Are you nuts?” And so on. I remained undeterred.

Our original rental in Sayulita. Pictures can be deceiving!

We scoured Airbnb for affordable places to stay and finally settled upon two that looked suitable. One in Sayulita for six weeks and one in a sweet little beach town up north called Chacala. We put our money down. But as the summer days dwindled into fall, my courage waned. I was mere days away from departing the Pacific Northwest for Texas, but I didn’t know how to tell my friend I was chickening out on driving. I didn’t want to get killed by the cartel. I didn’t want them to steal my van. I didn’t want to be a headline. And neither of us spoke Spanish which made the drive seem even more reckless.

It felt like chickening out, but I gathered my courage and confessed my fears. Turns out my friend was thinking the same things but was also afraid to tell me, sucking up her fears and putting on a brave face. After all, she had navigated around the world on her sailboat. Why would she be afraid of a little drive to Mexico? But, age does funny things to us. As does the news media.

We laughed and reconfigured our travel plans. My biggest challenge was figuring out how to get my dog, Bodhi, down there, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about it yet. I still had over 2000 miles to drive, camping sites to secure, work to do, sites to see. I would have to fly now, and my dog, Bodhi, too big to travel under the seat, would have to fly in cargo. I’d figure it out, I told myself. Shouldn’t be too hard Dogs fly all the time.

I didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about it yet. I still had over 2000 miles to drive, my sweetie and a rental awaiting me in Austin, Texas, camping sites to secure, work to do, sights to see.

A to Z Challenge, 2023

Published on April 3, 2023April 3, 2023 by Pam1 Comment

I’m going to try this again. I’m a day late, but I’ve got my A blog ready to go. I know I haven’t finished this series in a number of years, but maybe this year will be different. I need to start writing again. I need to commit to something besides work. So. Here we go. I plan to make this blog about my recent adventures in Mexico: how we ended up there, what we discovered, how it turned out. I may also sprinkle in a few tidbits about vanlife and how that is all unfolding: the challenges, the benefits, the weird and unexpected things that pop up.

H is for Home

Published on April 26, 2022 by Pam3 Comments

Home is where the heart is. Home is where you hang your hat. Home is that place where when you go there, they have to let you in. There’s no place like home.

You can never go home again.

I have been thinking about home a lot of late. What it means, where it is, where it has been.

The other night, I stayed in a campground less than five miles from one of my childhood homes, across the street from a church (now a furniture store) my family called home for about a year (until the business administrator—who had a prior conviction for embezzlement—ran off with the money and that was that). To get here, I had to drive through a small town where I spent the bulk of my elementary school years.

As a kid, I lived in at least five different houses by the time I was ten. And then, by the time I was 18, four more. Between the ages of 18 and 23, something like 20 (college, roommates, etc.). And then, five different places between a divorce and buying the place, the home, house I lived in from 1998 until last August.

Now, my home, my shelter, is a 21-foot RV. Home is where ever we (and by we, I mean my van and I) happen to be on any particular night.

But is it? What is home and how do we know when we are there? I recently left Texas after an extended stay and headed “home,” having purchased said RV as I had planned. But home is where exactly? The Pacific Northwest? Oregon where my brother (and now our mother) lives? Whatcom County where I’ve been, more or less, since 1981? Bellingham where I once lived or Ferndale where I often land to stay with one of my BFFs? I truly enjoyed Austin and environs. I met lovely people, got to hang out with my daughter and her friends on occasion, got to spend time with my sweetie.

But then I felt the pull, the tug of the familiar. I needed a haircut and to see the doctor. Somehow it seemed easier to go home and take care of those things than to start all over in a new city. It’s one thing to shop in an unfamiliar grocery store, not knowing where the dairy aisle is, quite another to choose a stylist out of the blue and risk a bad haircut. Easier to drive 2000 miles in the winter, over snowy mountain passes than to figure out how to get new insurance and a new doctor. Easier to just go home.

“You have moss in your veins,” my friend Laura announced upon my arrival. “You had to come back home.”

I’ll admit, I did feel a qualitative difference in my bones as I crossed that boundary between east and west, from dry and arid to damp and green. For a minute there, as my pores plumped and the cracks in my skin soaked the moisture from the air, I did feel the moss course through my veins. But does that feeling indicate home? Is home a state of mind or a peace of mind, or both?

Am I more like a turtle who always has her house on her back or am I one of the “unhoused” (by choice, yes, but technically without shelter according to the US Census). I count myself extremely lucky to have been able to choose this lifestyle rather than find myself forced into it by unfortunate circumstances. Still, the idea of it messes with my head a bit.

So, here I am, boondocking in my RV, on a small mountain top, in the middle of my home state, not far from one of my childhood homes, contemplating what it means to “be home.”

Maybe if I just click my heels together . . .

G is for Going

Published on April 10, 2022 by Pam5 Comments

Mom is moving next week. For the past six years, she’s lived the good life at a top-of-the-line Memory Care facility where she has watched friends come and go, die and “move around the corner” into more acute care as their dementia worsens. She’s maintained a sort of equilibrium since arriving, definitely on the slow train to full on incapacity, and that’s why she has to move. She’s out of money. She spent every last dime over the past six years on care so good, so top of the line, she has thrived. For someone with Alzheimer’s she’s pretty sharp, but not sharp enough. So, she and her dog Charlie are moving to a Medicaid facility in Oregon, nearer my brother. Thank god she can take the dog. Her life centers around that dog.

This afternoon I sprung her for an hour to show her my new RV—I showed her around, sat her down, and fired up the generator right there in the Memory Care parking lot so I could make her a cup of mint tea with sugar and milk. We sat and chatted. She admired the seats. I tried to keep the conversation on things she remembered, mainly the past, the grandkids, my brother and me. Mom talked often about getting an RV and traveling around the US in the years before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but she never quite got going.

While I was growing up, my parents were always going. We moved around a lot when I was a teenager. I went to four high schools. So, when I moved to Bellingham to attend college, I planted myself. I completed my four years and immediately signed up for graduate school. Then, I met a woman who wanted to have children, so we did. I stayed through divorce, and bought myself a house, and remarried and divorced again. Meanwhile, kids graduated and went to college. Got married. Moved away. I went to college. Again. Graduated. Got an office. And then, spent two years working alone in my house.

That working alone for two years did some stuff to us all, didn’t it? I noticed my house in ways I hadn’t before. Noticed its slow decay, realized all it would cost me, money/time/effort to keep it limping along into my dotage. Decided I wasn’t up for that much commitment. To a house. Plus, I looked on Zillow. It was a good time to sell.

The money certainly was nice, but I also realized that my house had served its purpose—it had held me for 23 years, through many starts and stops and ups and downs. Many lives lived in those four walls, and that’s just me. I did a lot of growing up while I lived in that house—the bulk of my adulthood, 23 of my 58 years. I loved a lot of things about my house. And many things about it truly annoyed me. It was not the place in which I wished to grow old. That place is somewhere else. I don’t know where yet. I’m on an adventure.

I’m going. Going to figure it out.