This just in: every minute you spend sitting in traffic to get to a job you hate, one more young adult decides to quit the rat race, sell everything, and hit the road.

Ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But the longer we’re on the road, the more we keep meeting crazy kids our age who are also fed up with running on the treadmill of job/home/stuff/debt.

Hitek Homeless Hits the Road
Take for instance, Johnny and Jenn, aka Hitek Homeless. We met this couple online last year, while their escape plans were coming to fruition. They bought a killer Arctic Fox truck bed camper and a diesel dualie, sold their stuff, and finally hit the road a few months ago. Recently, Truck Camper Magazine interviewed them about their decision to fulltime.

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Nearly a year ago now – way back in Deadwood, SD – I wrote about how the view is always different from our kitchen table. Another view that always changes for us is out our Bathroom window.

Being a skylight, the view is usually of the sky. Light during the day, but sometimes we see stars at night. Until it fogs up.

Nevertheless, I am always reminded that this adventure is still fun and exciting whenever I look up and see new trees. Or the best yet, this view of the bluff above our site at the 4J+1+1 Campground in Ouray, CO.

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Last year when we started this journey, one tank of diesel cost us somewhere around $80. This year, the pump shuts off at $99, and we have to slide our credit card again, for another $22 or so in fuel. Today, I just heard that prices are going up another 25 cents per gallon in the next few days.

I’m glad we’ll be workamping in Lake City Colorado during the so-called “peak driving season.” Maybe prices will stabilize after summer, when we hit the road again (one can always hope, right?). But if you’re on the road now, here are a couple of websites that can help you find the best prices in your area.

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We came across this earthen home near Pagosa Springs, Colorado. It’s under construction. We were so thrilled when we saw see a “For Sale” sign on the property. We thought “Hey, maybe it’s a sign! Is it meant to be?”

When we stopped to talk to the closest neighbor, he gave us the scoop.

The home is for sale because “Wild Bill” as he’s known by the locals, ran out of money after pouring over $1 million into it. It’s a bare shell, nothing more. It’s been on the market for over three years, and the property owners in this tidy subdivision near Williams Lake would be happy to see it blown up. They’d pay someone to bulldoze it if they could.

Looking at the sorry state of this property, one man’s earthship dream, got us thinking; maybe we don’t have enough money to be so green?

One year ago this week, we drove away from Humboldt County in a daze. We couldn’t believe that we had really pulled our sabbatical off, and year on the road seemed like an eternity. Little did we know that it would fly by seemingly as quick as a two week vacation. We have so much to say about our epic journey. But for now, let’s start with the hard numbers.

Thanks to the meticulous Quickbooks expense tracking I’ve done over the last several years, and Carol White’s Live Your Road Trip Dream book budgeting templates, I was able to put together a budget that works for us. In short: we came in under budget, and the money we’ve saved will enable us to continue to live this lifestyle for at least the next year if we choose to.

If you’d like to see the technical details, a PDF with summarized numbers is here. But if spreadsheets make you snooze, then here’s a quick summary of my numbers for the year, and some ways we saved money:

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This is the place I was talking about in that silly romantic post about where I proposed to René.

Considering the millennia it took to form Capitol Reef, not much has changed in Cohab Canyon over the past dozen years.

But we sure have.

Looking at the canyon, I recognize the old rock formations. Looking at the young tent campers nearby, I realize we would have bagged on all these big RVs and us old “campers” running our noisy generators.

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