Spending Your Free Time

There are pros and cons to vehicle dwelling. One pro is that you don’t have to work much to afford housing, so you can spend that extra money and/or time on fun things. You don’t have to clean a house, spend your weekends mowing the lawn or weeding the garden. The fact is that you may find yourself with an excess of time but wondering where to spend it.

When you live in a house or apartment your free time is often spent there or it is used as a home base for other activities. When you live on the road you really live everywhere. You may sleep in your vehicle but that’s not where you spend all your free time. I’ve said before that the double edged sword of mobile living is that you have nowhere to hide. That also means that, often out of boredom, you are forced to experience things you may have talked yourself out of otherwise.

So what do you do in your free time? All those extra hours that you might have been washing dishes or vacuuming the living room. 

Personally I...

• Take myself to the movies once a week. $5 matinees
• Found an auditorium at the college I can listen to opera and watch movies in Alone
• Read a lot! I go through books like I use to go through TV shows
• Study for school
• Sit at the coffee shop downtown
• Attend lectures
• Watch kids softball games
• Nap in the grass
• Go to museums

Being a fairly solitary person, I found that a quiet space was often challenging to find. But I did find them, out of necessity, and have been able to maintain my sanity by giving myself regular alone time. Remember that there are paid distractions and free distractions. Make sure that you are not going broke spending money on activities all the time. Even though you don't have a couch to lounge on, it's alright to have an afternoon of doing nothing.

Thoreau said "It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves." The routine of home to work, work to home and back again with those weekends dangling over you: two days of freedom on an otherwise scratched record. Through this routine the home is yours and you are the home's. Take the sticks and bricks house out of the equation and suddenly you have the option to work the same and have lots of extra money or have lots of free time and still live comfortably working part time.

I am a nester by nature, and enjoy decorating an apartment. For me, however, the time I spent making the money to live there took away from my actually having time to enjoy it. I work full time and attend college full time, but still have loads of free time on my hands. So learn a new instrument, take a class, see a show; the possibilities are endless and, when you're urban camping, you really don't have a choice but to put yourself out there.