The Rambler

A mere eight weeks ago we made the decision to pivot from nomadic RV life to stationary home living, and now the transformation is complete. We closed on a house a couple weeks ago and promptly moved in. By the end of the day after closing we'd cleared out our storage unit. During the week after closing we cleared the camper of all the stuff we had in it and thoroughly cleaned it, then handed over our RV to a dealership for sale on consignment.

It now feels like we've been in a state of suspended animation for the past eighteen months. It has been, and still is weird to be in the presence of stuff that we packed away eighteen months ago. We kept our bed. It is a really nice mattress, comfy and cozy, and sleeping on it now recalls my memory of how it felt before, and makes me compare it to sleeping in the RV - which was comfortable enough for sure. We still have the TV and Roku that we purchased more than ten years ago, and that we were using up until we left for the Appalachian Trail; now it's set up again just like it was before, on the same table. The Roku fishbowl is a welcome sight. We haven't seen it for a year and a half, and now it's back, and it almost feels like it never went away. Unpacking clothes and stuff that I haven't seen for so long, much of which I would never have thought about again except for its sudden reappearance, triggers memories. And I now sit at the very same computer table I had been using before, already arranged and cluttered much like it was. All of this elicits the feeling that I am living a time warp, the past eighteen months rapidly receding to just a dream, a fleeting existence.

What is different now however is that we're not here in a holding pattern for hiking or RV life; we're here for good. When we first came to Iowa City in 2023, we had the excitement of looking forward to hiking the Appalachian Trail and then moving into RV life, and we knew our time here would be short. We also had every intention to settle somewhere else, and did not expect to be returning permanently to Iowa City. So this feels different too, a bit odd and disorienting; easy and comforting to come back to because we know and love this place, but now it's not a holding pattern, it's for the long(er) haul, with no future adventures yet in our crosshairs.

I don't have much for pictures this time:

Here's the camper, at our final campground on Coralville Lake in Iowa City:

Here's the camper in the driveway of our new house, where it sat for a couple days as we did final cleaning and prep prior to putting it up on consignment sale.

A couple views of our new, empty house:

We visited with a nephew when we dropped off the RV.