Just Like Starting Over

At this time four years ago, we were beginning the journey documented earlier in this blog. We were 22 and 23, keen and idealistic, and pulsing with anticipation.

Christmas post-travels 2011

Over the last four years, our lives have shifted fairly drastically, then, in a way, morphed into a more circular narrative: in a sense, we are revisiting and reinventing our lives four years ago. Check it out:

In the post-van, pre-now years, we flew home and immediately engaged in the socially sanctioned things: Steff undertook a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology, Nancy began her career as a piano tuner, both of us bought cars and dutifully paid our rent fortnightly on a charming (read: undermaintained), overpriced one-bedroom apartment in the city.

We explored our surroundings and tried to approach the space around us openly and inquisitively. We were inspired by our life with less in the van, and by the permaculture farms and homesteads we had WWOOFed at while travelling. 

We did our best to translate this model to city living, learning about our local community, DIYing as much as we could, and simplifying. Auckland is a relatively compact city, which helped us to do things like collect produce directly from farmers. We also honed some kitchen magic skills, learning to make cheese, as well as our own cleaning and personal hygiene products.

The last four years were an experimental phase, where we dabbled in so-called civilised society, trying on preconceived notions of adulthood for size.

During this period, we also observed, evaluated, and refined our ideals. We reflected with our peers and found ourselves, after a while, in a world that was in direct conflict with what we had been told it would be. A university degree would lead to guaranteed work, we had been taught, but all around us was evidence to the contrary: overqualified peers in hospitality and retail, friends in overwhelming debt with no job prospects, hordes of acquaintances abandoning their tertiary qualifications in favour of reskilling in trades. The guidance we were receiving from the Gospel According to Generation Baby Boomer seemed increasingly irrelevant to our experiences, and as a group, we began to feel an uncomfortable mélange of confusion, isolation, guilt, and failure. The markers of success for their generation seemed now to be little more than a direct path to crippling debt. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Upon introspection, we realised that we have been trained to find happiness in the things we could buy, but that only leaves us suffocating in our possessions. In any case, we can't afford all the things the billboards and bus shelters tell us we need. We can't keep up with the releases of every new iGadget. More importantly, we can't afford the white picket fence house; a lot of us never expect to be able to in our lifetimes.

The question we came to, after deliberation, was “do we even want that?” Sure, some of our friends went to uni, got corporate jobs, and now have houses and mortgages to keep. We totally respect them if that's what keeps them happy, but is it what we want to make of the one shot we get at existence? Is there another way?

In November of 2014, we decided there is. And here is where we come full circle, from one small space to the next. We are building a tiny house.

Let's flesh out this picture a little: Nancy is a piano tuner, Steff is a permaculture practitioner and educator. 

Piano wrangling at the Royal Festival Hall in London, 2014

Getting all up in the terrestrial ecology

These, we are convinced, are the best jobs in the world. We play music in a band called Tweed, and occasionally (bonus!) get paid to do it. This is the best scantily-paid hobby in the world. This is how we sound.

And this is how we look!

We try to create, rather than find, happiness. We don't always succeed, but life is a work-in-progress right up until the end, right?

We are now 25 and 26. The last four years of our lives have been a blossoming of the ideals we set out to explore in the van, a trial-and-error in pursuit of a life that fits. We found conventional consumerism and the career-centric lifestyle left us feeling a bit hollow. We're trying something new. Are we still keen, idealistic, and pulsing with anticipation? You bet. Stay tuned.

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.
  

Floridays

Attention, readers! It appears that by the end of this entry, we will actually be up to date! We spent a month without internet, which, predictably, took its toll on the blog, chronologically speaking. Here do we document our last month in North America.

We arrived safely at Nancy's Dominican family's home in Ft. Lauderdale in mid-November. We had been driving since March of this year. We had successfully driven up the West Coast, across Canada, and down the East Coast, as was our plan from the start. We put approximately 12, 000mi on the odometer. Of course, after all this, Willie got tired...very tired. So tired, in fact, that she stopped, without warning, in the middle of an intersection several days after our arrival in Ft. Lauderdale--and she wouldn't restart. We coasted through the intersection to what happened to be a highway, just shy of a freeway onramp.  The irony of the fact that our "For Sale" sign describes the van as "reliable" was not lost on us. In fact, it is possible that Willie's stopping was, as Nancy's family suggested, Willie's way of expressing her displeasure at being put up for sale.

As a result, there was very little vacationing to be had whilst in Florida. For the first two weeks, Willie was at the mechanic, receiving some extremely expensive repairs. For the last two weeks, we feverishly cleaned Willie and made her presentable, so that we weren't leaving Florida with a semi-functional, geriatric van in our names. First attempts at cleaning were repeatedly interrupted by Nancy's aunt's next-door neighbour, who appeared to be a compulsive liar. Either that, or he was a concert cellist; an ex-marine; a deep-sea diver; a registered architect (in twenty-seven states!); and collector of rare and exotic animals, including two Great Danes, two bobcats, a Black Mamba, and the "New Zealand Green Mamba". We thought this last one must be extremely rare, as New Zealand doesn't have snakes...

We did eventually get the van cleaned. Finally, one day, we got in the van and realised that it was completely empty of clothes, of food, of our various magnets and bumper stickers, empty of our artwork, empty of postcards we'd collected along the way...empty of us. She wasn't our Willie anymore, and suddenly, it truly felt like our trip, this "vacation" was coming to an end.


Cleaning, day one.



Lucky the cat pays Steff's empty cupboard a visit.



Shiny and clean!

We did manage to escape the incredibly oppressive stress of trying to sell our home/vehicle/traveling companion with weeks, then days to spare by going to the beach one day.



We also celebrated Thanksgiving with Nancy's extended family. Or some of it, anyway. A little background: Nancy's mother has forty-one brothers and sisters. Nancy literally has hundreds of cousins. Thanksgiving was loud and raucous and gluttonous, and lots of fun. The dinner featured a pork roast, a ham, a turkey, several loaves of homemade challah (we made that), yuca, beans, cranberry sauce, various salads, and general merriment.



Some of the dinner spread. Nancy's uncle William volunteered to say a prayer for Thanksgiving,
but promptly forgot that he had made this offer. In this photo, everyone, including William,
is waiting for the prayer (or, in our case, the eating, which doesn't happen until the prayer is said)
to start.


We made friends with Nancy's cousin's daughter, who is as mischievous and daring as a toddler could possibly be. Here she has been caught setting up a ladder of sorts to access the leftover bread.

And of course, we found some great old family photos, including several of Nancy's mum, in her 20s. Surprise, Angela!

Steff befriended the neighbour's kittens. Everyday, William offered them to us (although they were not his), forgetting that we were leaving the country in the beginning of December.

Yin and Yang

Mother Cat, or Sinatra (ol' blue eyes).

Just as we were beginning to panic at being unable to sell the van, with six days left before our departure, an eccentric and tremendously verbose Greek family bought it. Granted, they paid us next to nothing for our beloved VW. On the other hand, however, living in Willie Westfalia meant that we never had to pay for a hotel room, or an interstate bus or train ticket, and we only ate in restaurants when we chose to do so. And despite everyone's doubts (including, to an extent, our own), she never really broke down. That is, at least, until it was convenient for everyone--relatively speaking. If she had broken down anywhere else on the trip, we'd have been in considerable trouble. Extra special thanks to Willie, for making this entire trip possible.

Nancy prepares for our final trip in Willie--to the Department of Motor Vehicles,
to change the title and hand over the keys. I took this photo with the intention
of making a sad face, but seeing it on a screen later on, we realised that
I looked far sadder than I had intended.

The farewell was bittersweet, but also an incredible relief, especially as she stalled on the way to the DMV (our fault) and took five or six tries to restart.

After Willie was sold, we felt free. We had tied up all of our loose ends, and all that was left to do was to pack, and donate all of what we couldn't pack or send home in the mail to Goodwill. We did this, bid our goodbyes to Nancy's grandmother, two aunts, two uncles, five cousins, their five children, along with their respective partners, jumped on a plane, and flew to Palmdale, California.

As we type this from Palmdale, we are repacking our bags, because tonight...we fly! From 10:15pm tonight, we will spend fourteen hours on a plane to Syndey, then three hours to Auckland. Home.

We are in a daze now, as the spheres of the many lives we have put together since our university graduation last year begin to fuse, and it reminds us forcibly of a movie we used to watch when we were little. In Peter Pan, Wendy agonises about her last night in the nursery. That is, until she takes a sabbatical in Neverland, learns a great deal about herself, and returns, ready to take that developmental leap out of the nursery. We are post-Neverland Wendys. We're ready to come home and plunge back into a life of responsibilities, and we feel better equipped to do it than we did last year. Don't exepect us to grow up, though!

You'll be hearing from us once we've soared through the skies to the other side of the planet, and caught up on sleep. We will update you with some parting thoughts.

Lots of love, and thanks for following our travels for all these months.
-Nancy and Steff


The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

Singing Songs About the Southland

After New York, we headed South, relatively quickly. We'd have loved to have stayed longer in some places, but, as we mentioned in a postcard, "we have tickets home now, so we gotta scoot". As such, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia passed by in a flash. [Cue movie-style montage, indicating passage of time]:

New Jersey
We visited with some old friends from New Zealand while in New Jersey. We also the visited the Jersey Shore, but alas, we saw not one guido. We did, however, find some mildly carnivorous seagulls.



Nancy's pseudo-grandparents.


Our friends very kindly took us to Philadelphia for the day. There, we saw an assortment of incredible street murals, Benjamin Franklin's loo, and various placards outlining fundamentals of American law. We thought some of them were especially pertinent, given the police brutality and brute force being used against peaceful protesters across the country.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Ben Franklin's commode.

Before we post the next photo, here's little background information. In Canada, there is a book series (and now, a morning cartoon spinoff) about a child-turtle named Franklin. He looks like this:

Each book title involves some activity of Franklin's (for example, Franklin Goes to School). The series is sickly wholesome. We thought the following sign was hilarious, because we couldn't get the image of this righteous little turtle out of our heads as we read it:

Damn Franklin's heirs!



The bottom comment translates to something like
"I always imagined paradise to be some kind of library."





Will meets Willie (Westfalia).

North Carolina
From there, we continued on to North Carolina, stealth camping for the first time in a Walmart parking lot along the way. We don't recommend it. There are some truly weird people going into Walmarts at 4am.



The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel-Bridge-Tunnel



A real cotton field!

 In North Carolina, we spent a week with Steff's family. They took us to the mountain towns surrounding Mooresville, which were beautiful. Certain mountain towns, such as Asheville, were interesting in that they were extremely liberal pockets almost completely enshrouded by the rest of the typically conservative state.

This photo certainly doesn't capture the variety and depth of autumnal colour in
these mountainous areas.

Steff makes friends.

Our next stop was Charleston, South Carolina. It was quite the experience driving into the urban centre. As we approached the city from the northwest, we saw row after row of chain-link fences, and houses with broken-down cars parked out front. We were planning on stealth-camping in the city, so we were feeling apprehensive; we reassured ourselves with the knowledge that the outskirts of a city often appear slightly more dangerous than the downtown area. However, as we continued, these "outskirts" stretched on. We exited the freeway and drove into the downtown, and still, we were surrounded by ramshackle buildings, buildings that were once beautiful but which now would probably not pass building inspection. Suddenly, we popped into what seemed to be a completely different city: the architecture was beautifully maintained, crisply painted. From Goodwill shops, gospel churches, and NAILZ TO GO, we had stumbled unexpectedly into the Grand Historic Downtown. There, we found hordes of tourists on walking tours, huddled into the tight city blocks and taking photographs. And for some reason, everyone was blonde-haired and blue-eyed. What happened to all of the African-Americans from two blocks back? What did they think of this version of Charleston, where everyone's accents were from out of state? That said, it was beautiful in downtown Charleston, but in the same way that a mask can be pretty or alluring. We liked this mask, definitely--old, verandah-ed homes, trees lining the streets, Spanish moss, the waterfront...but it felt a little ingenuine. We were not disappointed however: it was all part of the experience. Photo time!

This is where we ended up sleeping.



Nancy at the entrance to the old slave market. This market is now a huge area filled with tourist
merchandise--an interesting shift. The sign at the entrance reads
"Daughters of Confederacy".

 

 



Apparently most of these houses were originally
owned by plantation owners, as vacation homes.

  

 

Halloween is huge in America.



If Nancy ever made a rap album, this would be the cover.

Florida
...And from Charleston we drove to St. Augustine, Florida. Here we are at the Castillo de San Marcos fort.

Nancy takes in the Spanish moss as the Kiwi Moss takes her photo.



Stained glass windows from the St. Augustine Cathedal. The
building was rebuilt years ago, but it allegedly provided
a spiritual home for North America's oldest Catholic
congregation.





Occupy St. Augustine. He may be the only one
there, but he's occuping hard.

The wild epiphyte Tillandsia, also known as
air plants. They gather nutrients from the air,
and they're all the rage in Berkeley. The difference
 is that the Berkeley varieties are $5 a pop,
whereas these were everywhere in St. Augustine.

Following a few days in St. Augustine, we headed to our final stop for the trip: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Coming up next (click on the picture for full-size image):

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.