I know of Chris and Juan through Croft and fellow former Ottawans Kevin and Ruth have been following me since even before I got on the road. But here’s the kicker. The five of us met here in Mazatlán tonight, but Kevin and Ruth spent the summer just a few hours northwest of me in Saskatchewan and Chris and Juan pretty much drove right by Haven heading for the border after visiting Kevin and Ruth!
I’m telling you, the continent’s small and all roads eventually merge! I’m pretty sure the only (formerly) RVing bloggers I have left to meet are Sean and Louise from Our Odyssey! It was lovely to get to match voices to writing styles and faces.
At any rate, we had a nice time eating munchies and watching the big cruise ships sail out of port at sunset. Talking about RVing again was great, making me realise just how much I’m missing the lifestyle!
The day has come that I’m sure many of you saw coming.
This is the final post for Travels With Miranda. While RV living continues to be a huge part of my life and I do eventually plan to travel in an RV again, RVing is no longer the focus of my life.
I’ve been wanting to start blogging again more regularly, but have been hesitant because the subjects were not pertinent to an RVing blog. There is so much going on in my life right now, work, impending travel, and Haven projects that I need a blog that reflects my suddenly much fuller life.
So I can now be found at A Life By Design. This new blog is very much a work in progress and doesn’t have much content yet, but it will grow and expand as needed. I am going for a more minimalist look that focuses on the narrative. I also will be categorizing posts so that folks who are only interested in travel or RVing or Haven projects can just follow those categories.
You will find at the top a link to the new blog’s RSS feed as well as my new Twitter. I am keeping the Travels With Miranda facebook page for the time being and will continue to post on there regularly, as I have been doing for the past few months.
I hope that you will all follow me in this new chapter of my life and that my life will continue to interest you. Frankly, I look forward to writing about my experiences buying groceries in Mexico this winter instead of yet another season of blogging about how cold it is and how expensive propane is getting. 🙂
For those of you who choose to leave, thank you for sharing the journey to this point and best wishes in the future.
Sitting here at my property, Haven, in early September 2014 on the cusp of leaving for a winter in Mexico, it is time to concede that my old Travels With Miranda blog is no longer relevant.
My life has grown to encompass so much more than the RV lifestyle. While I am still living full-time in a motorhome, I am not traveling in it, and it is parked on my very own little prairie homestead. I am surprised to have taken root in this place, I who wanted so badly to know only the uncertainty of the open road. But now I know that the very thing I feared is the only thing that could truly set me free.
This new blog will be more all encompassing of this new direction that my life is taking and will be one where anything I wish to share will be relevant. I look forward to chronicling not only my Mexican winter, but also the cabin building on my property, the things I will see in between, and the more mundane moments of life that make the extraordinary sparkle all the more.
It is not a new life that is beginning with this new blog, but one that continues to evolve and improve. I hope that my Travels With Miranda readers will follow me here even if RVing is no longer the focus of my life. As it turned out, RVing was a bridge more than a landing place, a way to expand my horizons, make me reexamine priorities, and determine exactly how it is I am meant to live if I am to feel whole, happy, secure, and fulfilled.
Spring seems to be settling into southern Saskatchewan even as the eastern part of the continent is still getting pounded by snow.
The weather has been mild here for days, the wind almost gentle, and the snow is vanishing rapidly. Spring in rural southern Saskatchewan is very icy, muddy, and smelly.
With longer and warmer days, my energy levels are peaking and I cannot wait to get back outside and work on my property. It’s been a long winter of typing at my desk and I am eager to spend more time outside, working the kinks out of dormant muscles.
It’s nice to be back in temperatures where the electric heaters are sufficient to keep the rig very cozy. I tend to wake up every time the furnace goes off and therefore need very long nights to make up for the broken sleep. Not having needed the furnace in about a week, I’m seeing my sleep needs go down dramatically. Couple that with the extra hours of sunshine and I’m slowly shifting back into summer mode of needing less sleep and getting up earlier.
I’m six to eight weeks away from moving Miranda back to Haven, where I’ll be able to assess the damage from the winter. I know for certain I have some roof leaks to attend to. I also need to empty out all my cabinets and make sure there isn’t any mould in the corners from melted frost. During one cold spell, I actually found clothing frozen to the back of the wardrobe!
It feels like a lifetime since I moved here in October and it’s good to be thinking of moving again in terms of weeks, not months. And yet, the time has flown by. It’s been a very insular winter and I am so eager and ready to get back out into the World.
That starts tomorrow, as I’m heading up to Stettler, Alberta, for a much needed long weekend away. I can’t wait to see Donna and Ken! I’ve planned out a different route to get there, just to shake things up a bit.
We’ll see how the building move and power installation goes, but if work keeps up the way it is, I look forward to my next long weekend off at the end of May, exploring the Black Hills. It’s on my calendar, so it could happen. 🙂
I’m glad that so many of you are on Facebook. I’ve acquired a taste for posting updates there as it is just so quick. But I do promise to ease back into more regular posting to the blog. This hiatus was just what I needed, but I rather miss signing onto WordPress and boring you all with the mundane details of my life. 🙂
I’m a little boggled that my half-decade anniversary of being on the road has come. That time span doesn’t feel real to me.
The last five years have been some of the best and most challenging of my life. Every time I thought I finally got a grip on my nomadic existence, something would come to bend it back out of shape. That is the nature of all lives, I guess, but mine was especially precarious. I think that establishing Saskatchewan residency will be the missing cement to the shaky foundation of my life.
When I set off five years ago, I dreamed of making a name for myself RVing, but dared not fathom of a future that would put me on the cover of an RVing magazine, being interviewed by a major TV morning show, that I would get quite the spread in one of Canada’s most prominent newspapers, or that strangers would knock on the door and say, “Hey, I recognize you from the blog!”
Five years ago, I could only only hope to winter in a sunny clime, feel the midnight sun on my face, summit a mountain, freeze my toes in the Arctic Ocean, never mind do so much more than all that. I also could not imagine the friends I would meet along the way or that I would one day find a place where I would belong.
My life’s in a little bit of a limbo right now as I am coming to grips with just how hard I have fallen in love with my little piece of Saskatchewan and the people who populate that world. I am just grateful that the last five years have reminded me that such contentment at being in a beloved location never lasts and restlessness is guaranteed to follow. Therefore, I have to find a balance between making Haven comfortable while still being able to wander.
When I started RVing, I really enjoyed blogging about my life and the odd adventure that I have. But living so publicly began to weigh on me and I found myself wondering if the decisions I was making were best for me or best for the blog.
This past spring, I came to the conclusion that blogging was no longer a good use of my time. I cherish the friendships I have made through this blog, but regularly blogging about my life is just not something I’m interested in doing anymore. I made the decision in the spring to review how I felt on my fifth anniversary and the sentiment still holds. So I’ve been thinking about this post for about six months.
I don’t want to be one of those bloggers who says, “I quit!” and then comes back a few weeks later, almost as though they are seeking attention. So this isn’t the final Travels With Miranda post. I just don’t know when, or even if, I’ll be back. I’m thinking that taking a break might help refresh me and maybe even motivate me to get through a backlog of technical post drafts stemming from the seminar this summer…
I really like the Travels With Miranda Facebook page for giving updates, so that’s where you can go to get updates on Miranda’s out of province inspection, winter plans, and more. It’s a public page, so you don’t need to be a member of Facebook; just bookmark the link. Soon as I hit publish on this post, I’m heading there to share some information of importance to Snowbirds (hint, I recently got a letter from the IRS).
I love and appreciate each and everyone of you who has followed me along the way, whether it was from the very beginning or if you came on board at a later date. I am so grateful for the advice, hospitality, and help in all forms that you have given me. I hope that you’ll still try to keep in touch because my days of adventure and wandering are far from over!
