What Have I Been Up To Since August?

It’s been a while since I’ve written: life has been happening fast for me lately and I haven’t taken the time to sit with my experiences and reflect on what they mean. To get you up to speed, I continued traveling in the van through Montana, Idaho, and Washington, decided that since borders still won’t be open in any real way this winter that I would get a contract job again, met a boy on a hike in the middle of August, decided to settle in Seattle (including renting an AirBnB for a couple of months) so I could continue seeing him, and signed a 7-month work contract that ends in March 2021. Like I said…life has been happening fast.

Throughout the summer I put some thought and energy (but maybe not as much as I originally intended) into creating this website, writing more, and posting more on Instagram to see if I could enjoy sharing my life as a means to eventually financially support myself instead of going back to consulting every year or two. While I’m not completely shutting that idea down and will continue to post when I want, I did learn a decent amount about the “influencer” industry and spent a lot of time learning from other vanlife and travel accounts on what it might really take. Long story short, I don’t think that creating content at the frequency which consumers (and advertisers) really require aligns with my desires. I enjoy writing when I feel moved to write, I enjoy taking pictures when something strikes me as unique or beautiful or special, I enjoy sharing pieces of myself that I think are beneficial when I take them from my brain and put them into words - but I don’t enjoy sharing for the sake of creating content. I also found myself dreading writing more towards the end of the summer because I felt that I had to write what would be useful to others, rather than what I really wanted to write about. Which is probably why this website has gone a bit by the wayside now that I’m living a fairly busy life again (job, boyfriend, dealing with living in a city again, etc.) - it felt like a chore rather than a joy so it got put last on my weekly list of things to do and never got done. And in true Shelly fashion, I felt guilty about my lack of writing, which then compounded each week I didn’t write, until I felt embarrassed to even open my own website because I felt it mocking me for not writing. I’m aware that my perfectionism is what has led me to so many great things in my life (consulting career, excellent vacation / backpacking trip planner, ability to live nomadically because I can plan for each move) but is also my downfall when it comes to being able to have a healthy relationship with anything that I’m not the best at.

I think I just wrote that whole paragraph as an apology and explanation to myself. And now that I’ve written it and purged it from my thoughts, I feel freer (free-er? is that a word? it should be. I guess it’s ‘more free’) to get excited about future phases of my life and how I will write about them here on this website and in my own personal journals. Onward.

So! What have I been up to? To start, do you want to hear the most adorable falling-in-love story / meet cute of all time? That story informs all the things I’ve been doing since August and what the next couple years of my life look like. On my 31st birthday I decided to thru-hike the Enchantments (~20 miles, 6,500 of elevation gain) - it’s supposed to be the trail that every Washingtonian has to do in their lifetimes. Most people break it up into a 2 or 3 day backpacking trip but overnight permits are borderline impossible to get so I decided to do it in a day. About 4 miles in, I started chatting with 4 guys at Colchuck Lake where we were all filling up our water before heading up Aasgard Pass. They asked where I was from, I said that I was currently living in a Sprinter van and touring around the country, and one of the guys said that he builds vans. I said that my original plan was to move abroad in March but then COVID hit, that same guy said he was planning on moving to Chile in April but that also got cancelled due to COVID. He asked where I was planning on traveling abroad, I said that I was planning on spending some time back in Southeast Asia and that I used to live in Thailand. He had also lived in Thailand the same year I did. Needless to say, we immediately had some things in common. Also, one of the guys in the group is dating a girl who works at West Monroe! Very small world. The guys asked if I wanted to join them to go up Aasgard Pass and although I was nervous I couldn’t hang at their speed, I said yes mostly because I was terrified of the pass and happy to have some people to do it with, but also so I could keep talking to Van/Thailand/Chile boy. The 5 of us spent the next few hours hiking up Aasgard and through the Core Enchantment Zone before all of us kind of splintered off for the descent at our own speeds. Van/Thailand/Chile boy and I ended up doing the last 10 miles together and discovered even more things we had in common: EDM music, expat life (we both lived in Germany and Thailand for a bit), taking huge chunks of time off of work solely to explore / enjoy life, social / political beliefs, our passion for travel and how it makes us better people, and the list goes on. We wrapped the hike, met up with the rest of his friends, they sang me happy birthday, and we drank beers in my van at the trailhead. It is one of the best days of my life.

Van/Thailand/Chile boy is named Parker and is now my partner.

Throughout the next couple of weeks I spent time in Seattle with Parker working on his new van, having long chats on the balcony, exploring the city he went to college in, and just generally falling hard. Since I hadn’t started work again yet, I spent the weekdays exploring Washington solo in the van (Rainier, Olympic Peninsula, etc.) and spent the weekends with Parker. I decided I didn’t want a good thing to end so I booked a 2-month AirBnB in Seattle so that Parker could finish building another van and we could plan what the winter should look like. We have now decided to spend the winter in Silverthorne, CO so that he can ski every day and I can be closer to friends while also having an apartment to work at until my work contract is up at the end of March. After that? We are both moving into our vans (yes, I am moving into mine and he has one of his own, we both love our own vans too much to combine into a single van) and traveling the Southwest US and (hopefully) Baja, Mexico for 3-4 months. And after that? Watching some of my best friends get married in NM and CO. And after that? We are planning on moving to South America for ~6 months (hoping a vaccine will be available by that time). And after that? Maybe Asia again…but who knows. So yeah, I’ve met my partner, and it feels good to plan future adventures with him rather than solo.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Finding my partner, going back to work, living in an apartment, and being fairly normal. Being out of the van and back at work has definitely brought back the old stressors of life but I’m getting older and wiser and continuing to learn that stress is toxic to me and I need to wake up each day and choose not to let it overtake me. It’s a work in progress. I have more thoughts that I want to get out of my brain and into words in the near future about what this summer meant to me and how I changed as a person, but for now I’ll just say it was the best summer of my life.

Parker and I move in together tomorrow…and…it feels like the rest of my life is starting.