A Vision in Orange Laminate

Three weeks?!?  Where does the time go?  Where were we?

Ah, yes.  The caravan.  Did I mention the caravan?  No?

We bought a caravan.  On purpose.  A grant old lady (almost as old as I am), lovingly maintained with original finishes by her careful owner for over 35 years.  And by ‘original finishes’ I mean all the orange laminate your average safari-suit wearing, cocktail-swilling man-about-the-Badplass-caravan-park could desire.  With matching burgundy velvet curtains and original chocolate and naartjie upholstery, nogal.  To warm it all up, said original caravanner had also overlaid the beige linoleum with a plush brown thick pile carpet.  Delightful.

I wish I was kidding.  Dean actually found the magazine advert for our new Wilk 570 4-berth behemoth, circa 1982, and it is 100% accurate, cocktail cabinet and all:

Hideous or not, she’s ours now and, as of 01 September this year, will form half of our transitional homestead.  The plan, as it stands at the moment, is in three stages:

Stage One: Get fed up with everything and sell the house

Stage Two:  Buy a caravan and park it in my best friend’s back yard adjacent to the 2-bedroom cottage she already has there.  Live in both for a year or so, and steal more than our fair share of avocados from her avo tree.

Stage Three: Find a piece of land with lots of trees in the area, buy it and commence Operation Container Home over the next 18 – 36 months, with the final goal to be living off-grid and 100% debt free within the next five years.

Easy peasy.

Serendipitously, Best Friend (aka Debs) had her long-term tenants move out of the 2-bedroom garden cottage on her property just as we were successfully (and rather unexpectedly) selling our house. She’s in the market for new rent-payers and seems genuinely thrilled that it’ll be us. We spend half our lives at each other’s houses anyway, so we may as well make it official!  Debs and her daughter Hannah are honorary Inscrutable Tribe members, and the idea that the nine of us will be muddling along together on the same property for the next 12 – 18 months has us all thrilled.  It speaks very much to our growing need to cultivate community as an antidote to the isolation and loneliness that pervade the suburbs.  I had thought for a while that it was perhaps a uniquely White-South-African thing – to be so isolated from our neighbours, behind the high walls, electric fences and alarm systems that we rely on for safety in our crime-stricken country.  However, I’ve heard similar views expressed by American, Canadian and Australian RVers and caravanners on numerous YouTube videos over the last few weeks.  I’ve been binge-watching the stories and accounts of people who, for various reasons and in varying ways, have reached the same conclusion that we have about downsizing, simplifying and ultimately escaping from the debt-cycle that is home-ownership and the Pursuit of Stuff.  It’s been so affirming to hear our own recently-solidified views and ideas expressed by people all over the world who are already living the way we want to!  A BIG theme in most, if not all, of the videos I’ve watched is the idea of community, and how we’ve sacrificed social cohesion and our natural gregarious tendencies on the altar of picket fences.  As Bob Wells of http://www.cheaprvliving.com  succinctly puts it: ..’today, the hermits live in houses.’.

Debs has lots of additional space for storage, a functional workshop and a spare room that I can rent as an office, so the immediate concerns I had regarding where to base the business are addressed.  Also, we’ll be able to keep some of the things we will need when we start building close at hand until the time comes.  In return, Debs gets built-in babysitters, puppy-sitters and Friday wine-on-tap when the clan descends, so it’s all working out brilliantly.  The circle widens, and the vision evolves (literally as well as figuratively – the orange has to go…)

Debs doesn’t know about the diabolical avo plan yet.