Something I want to do more in my forties and into my fifties – travel to new places 🛻

Next year I am thinking of getting a new, small, reliable fuel efficent pickup truck. It won’t be cheap but after 14 years with Big Red I’m due for something newer and more reliable that will open up more options for travel beyond my usual haunts in New York through West Virginia.

In 14 years from now I will be 56, going on 57 years old. It will be 2038, and I will potentially able to take state retirement with more then 25 years in with the system. Maybe it will be meger retirement compared to if I stayed longer, but I if I can focus on building my off-grid homestead full-time and be mostly self-sufficient, in end does money really matter? But that’s something more for the late 2030s.

In the mean time, I want to explore and see more of America. What is it really like living in Rural Midwest tor even the West? I don’t really have much interest in seeing the Grand Canyon or Zion National Park. I much rather spend my time on backroads in my pickup truck, camping on a dirt road in some little pull off along the way in National Forest. Have a fire in an informal stone ring, spend the night in the wilderness. See places that aren’t in the tourist brochures.

People are like buying a new truck is a terrible idea. Depreciating asset! Poorhouse life! Less money to invest! Don’t you want a big house with vinyl siding and an asphalt roof in a suburban neighborhood where people would be horrified at plastic in a burn barrel and smell of hogs? Rundown homesteads are hardly an investment, don’t you want to be a successful professional, a unit director and have a nice place in suburbs so close to work and giant mounds of garbage that are everywhere these days?

Truth is I want to get away from the giant mounds of garbage, even if my old truck of the past decade and a half is soon to be shred and mounded up in one of those piles.  I don’t want a plastic picket fence or granite counter tops or all the things that “wealthy folk” have in their house. I want a life that looks like a run down hunting camp, then something invested in. But in the mean time, I want to travel and see more of Real America and not the plastic crap towns and canned tourist parks they advertise in those glossy magazines that aren’t even that great for starting fires.