What We Wish We’d Known Before Overlanding Full-time (Part 5)

Welcome back, as I blog my in-progress ebook. This is Part 5. As a quick introduction, I’m Brittany Highland, and I’ve been traveling full-time by vehicle with my husband Eric since February 2014. We’re currently driving around the world with our five-year-old son, Caspian. We originally spoke about what we wish we’d known before overlanding full-time at several events in 2021, including Overland Expo.

I have so much to share that I decided to turn our presentation into my first ebook. Once the ebook is complete, I’ll be emailing it to all our subscribers for free. That way, you can download the PDF file and refer to it whenever you want to.

If you want to go back and catch up, you can do so here:

• Part 1: Stuff is a sad substitute for experience
• Part 2: Stuff is a sad substitute for hands-on training
• Part 3: Payload capacity doesn’t go away if you ignore it
• Part 4: Overlanding involves intentional self-deprivation

Besides the limits on how many things you can take with you (refer to lesson #4), here is another way overlanding involves intentional self-deprivation.

5/ Logistics involved (can’t play constant tourist)

The beautiful thing about any short-term trip is that most of the logistics are arranged before you go. That’s what makes it feel like vacation: you don’t have to fit in a call with your CPA, find a pharmacy to refill your prescription, or do your laundry. Sometimes you don’t even have to worry about getting turned around in a strange grocery store because your fridge holds enough food to last the entire journey (seriously, why don’t all grocery stores share the same floor plan?).

Not so with full-time overlanding. We looked forward to this phase of life for all the freedom it would offer, the natural beauty we would surround ourselves with, the historical sites we’d get to tour. The play time!

But what we quickly learned is that full-time travel is not a vacation. It’s real life, in a constantly changing setting. Though we have simplified our life tremendously, something I’m forever grateful for, there are some logistics you can’t escape no matter what.

In a normal week as full-time overlanders, these are the types of things we’ve tackled:

• Which grocery store in this completely unknown town is most likely to stock blueberries for our four-year-old that aren’t molding?
• Should we spend half a day getting our clothes washed at the lavandaría, or hope one of our upcoming campgrounds will have a washing machine?
• Eric’s cholesterol medicine is almost gone. Which direction are we driving next? We need to find a mailing address to use.
• My mother-in-law’s insurance company is asking for this form to be signed and faxed back. This is 2022, right? Just checking. Let’s go find a printer.

You get the idea. It’s normal life. Yet it’s actually more challenging than normal life because we face all the familiar adulting challenges, without the infrastructure to confront them. So not only do we have to file our taxes and find a dentist, but we have to simultaneously build the infrastructure while constantly on the move. It’s like a video game, but not as entertaining.

Even simple tasks take substantially more time. You can imagine the difference between hitting print on the computer in your home office versus searching for a printing shop on Google Maps, driving across town to get there, waiting in line only to realize you don’t know the words for “landscape” or “portrait” in Spanish…go through all the steps in your mind and I think you’ll see what I mean.

I’m not trying to be a downer, I promise. But this ebook is about all the things we wish we’d known before overlanding full-time, and this is a huge lesson we’ve learned that rarely gets seen on Instagram.

The bottom line is you can’t play tourist all the time as a full-time overlander. Real life doesn’t go away just because you decide to live on the road.

Having said that, no one wants to live like a tourist for 365 days a year, anyway. Part of “real life” is balancing the fun times, not-so-fun times, and also the slow times of rest. As humans, no matter how or where we live, we need all three.

COMING UP:Meteorology matters (chase the weather)

Stay tuned for the sixth lesson I share, as I blog my in-progress ebook. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to sign up for a copy of my complete ebook, which I’ll email you for free as soon as it’s finished.

Thanks for participating in my blogging experiment. We’ll see you soon for the next lesson we’ve learned–the hard way!

-B