We all know that 2020 has been the hardest, most challenging and emotion causing year any of us who are my age and younger and many of those older have had in our lives. Fear for ourselves, for our friends, for our planet, for health, for our own personal economic situations and fear for the economic situation of everyone around us and this is just the start of the list of fears.

The years of The Curious Adventure and this blog have been one of marked laziness in maintaining the blog for whimsical reasons. I kept and created the blog because I love to write (at times) and I love photography and video (all of the time) and I love the adventure of the travel that I have done but even when things were going absolutely great for years I would forget to post for …. months …. and months. I would make a “commitment” to myself to make a regular post and it would last for all of … one post…

When I got the new Travato in 2019 I really, really wanted to post about the great adventure of traveling from Alaska to Florida because I figured I could maybe even share some useful tips that people in my audience might actually use (as opposed to discussing how to use the metro in Ukraine … which next to no one would ever even use) and then – well, driving through the amazing USA and flying my drone and hiking just seemed to take up more time than planned and – once again, a year flew by..,,,

And then the pandemic hit and like everyone, I got impacted by it. For a person whose life was traveling around it was a big shock and for a person whose income is mainly dividends from partial ownership of restaurants this was also a huge change. Time to reflect and re-define.

At the start of the pandemic I felt like the best option was to rent an actual house to live in for a couple of months and this was definitely the best choice. It was also probably the longest that I have gone for 8 years with literally every night in the same physical bed. I found a place to hunker down in Arizona and stayed in like the rest of the world.

After those months, with an understanding of the seriousness of the pandemic but also the knowledge that I live a personally pretty solo lifestyle I decided to head on the road in the van and, given the loss of income, really dig in to the land that is part of the American Bureau Of Land Management and National Forest land where you can stay and live for free for 14 days in any one place.

And so, for now, here’s what I found — this video kind of captures a lot of what I saw and figured out about “living off the land” in the United States.

Until next time – (hopefully sooner than later)