Literally dying at the last line of the last blog I wrote (about spending last month, December 2021, in New Jersey):

“It was time to head out, to our destiny in Rockford, Illinois. No, but seriously. It’s like our dream house and it will be so much fun to stay in and who knows what will end up finding there or where we’ll go next. WHO THE FUCK EVEN KNOWS.”

SPOILER ALERT: We ended up buying a camper and heading back to Maine.

But first, the story of our time in Rockford, before we knew that was our next step.

Okay so the drive was just meh, you know? The first day was from New Jersey to somewhere in Ohio. Does that even matter? It’s Ohio. We booked a hotel that was marketed as a romantic getaway. Each room was a “suite” with a gigantic whirlpool tub and an attached one car garage - that super appealed since we had a roof box and all our shit on board.

It ended up being weird as fuck, which made the reviews seem super depressing because so many people were saying it was like best place ever and they went there every year for their anniversary and blah blah blah but really it was just these fucking strange little one story boxes with no windows and cheap decor just sort of oozing with sad assery. It was like if Motel 6 tried to make honeymoon suites. BUT. It was quiet and the bed was decent and soaking in a whirlpool tub after a long day of driving did have its appeal.

ANYWAY. The next day was New Years Eve and it was a much shorter drive and easier day. Driving into Rockford though was kind of a limp dick. It does not make a great first impression even though it’s actually a really charming and adorable city. Our Airbnb was completely bangin though. It was situated on the edge of a park and as soon as we drove up the length of the park and turned into the neighborhood it was like oh, okay, yes.

The host met us at the house and he was as gay as they come and gave us a fun little tour and had left us some champagne and snacks and it was just a complete dream. It was like yes, this is the level of service I would like to be receiving. I mean. We reclined in those Eames chairs by the fire with bubbles and a cheese plate and it was like a complete peak. What a great way to start the year.

And the house was just….it was stunning. My voice cracks at the end of the walk through video because I just couldn’t fucking believe we had actually booked this house and were going to be living there for two whole months. It was surreal.

We had a load of groceries delivered shortly after we checked in, which ended up being really great as it fucking dumped an epic butt load of snow the next day. Not that we wanted to leave the paradise of the house anyway. We did venture out for a walk though - the house was situated on the edge of Aldeen Park, so the backyard led directly into the park and there were all kinds of little trails and it was super fucking cute.

A few days after we arrived, pretty much as soon as we could, we went and got boosters - this was at like the height of the first Omicron variant so we were still pretty sketched out. The booster sucked fucking ass. It was the goddamn worst. This was all we did for three days:

One afternoon I was in the bath for so long that the water got cold, but I didn’t care. I called him in to wash my back and he said, “Why are you sitting in this luke warm ass water??” Then I had him wash my back and he said, “Your bacne looks better, that one fucker finally fuckin fucked off….”

One morning we were in bed and had a fake argument:

Me: I’m so cold and miserable right now.

Him: I’ll show you cold and miserable.

Me: Oh yeah?? Show me, asshole!!

Him: Pssh, I’ll throw yer ass outside. We’ll see who’s cold and miserable then.

And then basically the coolest thing ever happened - our La Marzocco machine was delivered. That was just like so nuts. I mean - I remember getting misty eyed and emosh when we were living on our friends bus in Maine last year and we got our coffee grinder delivered. It was pretty much the first time I had ever spent that kind of money on a material possession and just to be able to do it comfortably, it just symbolized so much about how far we had come. So this was like, you know, ten times that feeling. This fucker was delivered at a scheduled time on a fucking pallet and Kris had to buy some special tool just to open it. And it weighed like 75 fucking pounds. It was insane. I was just praying to fuck we didn’t have to haul it around with us for too long and that the next place we go to from here is “the place” and not another fucking Airbnb.

Here’s a little slideshow to scroll thru of our coffee journey. Cuz we started with drip coffee just like everyone else:

Between the booster, the variant, the coffee machine, the amazing house, and Kris getting an Oculus, it took us a couple of weeks to even really start to venture out into Rockford. The house was such an oasis.

I spent a lot of time in the hammock chair out back and then I received literally the greatest present of all time ever from my treasure of a new friend, Kandi:

We’d had it in our minds that we were going to house hunt in Rockford and possibly buy a cheap house there to be the “for right now” solution because we were losing our fucking minds after 18+ months of living in Airbnbs. It would’ve been different if we could’ve stayed bouncing between Europe and the U.K. as planned, but Airbnb-ing in the U.S. sucks a fat one. We weren’t exactly sure yet how we’d get an actual mortgage given that we have no income on paper aside from crypto and were just assuming that was going to be kind of a headache, but that ultimately it would work out because our investment portfolio was large enough. And in the meantime, we figured it couldn’t hurt to at least go see a few houses and get the ball rolling and maybe hook up with a nice realtor and/or mortgage broker along the way. We started scouring Zillow and found a few places and ended up meeting this really sweet realtor who we were able to be just pretty straight up with about our situation. We told her we were not looking for our dream house, just something decent enough for right now and to serve as a base to travel from, and how whack ass we looked on paper and just sort of our unconventional setup. She was cool and she thought we were cool and it was fun to go around town with her looking at things.

And we discovered Rockford is kind of fucking adorable. It’s sort of like a forgotten city. It’s an hour west of Chicago, so mega convenient. And it has a small town vibe, but it’s a big enough city to have everything you would need. There’s like no traffic and it’s really easy to get around. They have an adorable downtown that goes along the river and tons of parks and green spaces + a super rich local arts/food/culture scene. We had amazing food at The Norwegian and world class coffee at Rockford Roasting Co and overall it was just pretty fucking charming. We could definitely see ourselves setting up a base there. Like, why the fuck not kinda, you know? It was just as good as anywhere else. We did have some shitty Mexican food though. Ha.

Kris kept in pretty regular contact with the host who it turns out is a close friend of the owner. We got to meet the owner too and he was just an awesome guy. He and Kris had a lot in common, not surprisingly. He had just curated the house so meticulously down to the last detail. It was nuts. Like the patio chairs were super comfortable so I googled them to make a note of where to buy them. Nope! They’re vintage from the 1960s going for $1200 a piece on ebay. Ha. He even had an old ass vacuum. It was like beyond just a love for mid century modern, he’s obsessed, a proper historian. He was a super nice guy and gave us all kinds of good info about the city and surrounding area.

Then a dear friend of ours, Jamie, came to visit us and it was just one of the coolest things ever. I don’t even know how to describe it, but basically back in the heyday of our time in Phoenix we had about 5 solid years where we were entrenched in the birth community and hanging out with all of those crunchy hippie birth people (I mean we were those assholes too, at the time, totally brainwashed and down the rabbit hole). There were lots of worlds overlapping, birth and yoga and energy healing and all of that kind of shit. Jamie was very much in the scene, but she was always like way cooler than us and we never really truly had formed a relationship with her outside of the group. Then cue the year of darkness (2017) when basically our whole lives fell apart from top to bottom and our whole community just vanished into thin air and it was really traumatic and fucking awful and anyway - fast forward a few years later and Jamie and I sort of reconnected online but I was still kind of gun shy from the massive rejection of 2017 and I thought about asking Jamie if she wanted to come and visit but figured she’d think I was just this fucking weirdo from her old life who had wildly misinterpreted some casual social media connection. But I asked her anyway and she said yes and then she actually came and she brought her boyfriend who we had never met and he ended up being legit the coolest guy ever and the whole weekend they visited was just like…I mean it like healed my actual soul, you know?

It was so grounding to be with someone that had known us for a long time and that knew this old version of us and could really appreciate how we had just clawed our way out of that hole. And she had crawled her way out too. That’s putting it all in an insanely tiny nutshell. That whole scene was just so bad with the birth bullshit and the toxic people and the wellness cult shit and just…to see her again after we had both made it out the other side of that was really powerful. I’m so glad I got to have that experience. It was really needed by all of us.

Plus it was just so nice to be with people after all this time traveling and having no connections and no real social outlets. And it was just the kind of thing where they came for four days we did not leave the house one single time. From morning to night we were just lounging around in our pajamas, eating delicious food, having deep conversations, laughing until we fucking cried, telling all of our divorce stories, talking about getting sucked off in a quiznos bathroom and the concept of prosthetic adult balls in infants, the power of your post-vasectomy shoots, and that time we got side by side erotic massages in Budapest. Anyway it was just the best.

After they left, we pivoted back to house hunting / how the fuck are we going to convince someone to give us a mortgage. Our original reservation in Rockford was for 2 months, with our host knowing the deal - that we were house hunting and who knew if that would go fast or slow. But as we started to get closer to the end of our reservation it was like - shit or get off the pot, fish or cut bait (is that the saying?) Like we needed to let our host know if we were staying longer so he could plan his life, but it’s hard to let someone know the plan when you don’t know what the fucking plan is. But we figured at the very least, another month made sense since it wasn’t like we were gonna close on a house in the next two weeks. So, we agreed to stay thru the end of March.

Kris talked to a few different brokers and basically we would at minimum need our 2021 taxes done to show the recent big crypto gains. But that’s a lot easier said than done and obviously the second week of January people aren’t like done with their taxes. That kind of threw us for a loop and it took Kris several weeks, it’s just so fucking complicated and tedious. But we thought with that and with our bank statements showing actual money coming from crypto into our bank on a regular basis that we might be able to get someone to get onboard.

But it turns out no one wanted to get onboard. It’s so frustrating that no one recognizes this, it’s just so new and no one knows what to do with it. Even though we have things like the daily returns from staking - it’s not recognized as interest and dividends, but rather considered capital gains which you cannot claim as income either. And income is what you need to get a mortgage. So that sort of changed everything. We technically had enough money to buy a house outright, but that’s not the point of any of this. The point is to have true financial freedom. Not just make enough to buy a house and then be back at square one. We’re just like in this middle ground grey area. The options and choices open up when you’re over the financial hump and into the next bracket of life. But there isn’t much to choose from down here.

So then we were like, well... Fuck. What do we do now? We can’t keep living Airbnbs because it just sucks ass but also it’s outrageously expensive (in the U.S.) and just not sustainable. Rockford was our last planned stop, we were tired, we were out of ideas, we were just done. But it’s not like when you’re done that anything happens, you know? You still have to figure out what you’re going to do next and in our case - where we were going to live when this reservation ended.

We thought about living on our friends bus again, but we knew that wasn’t sustainable either. It’d just like a really short term solution. The bus is off-grid with no running water or plumbing, so it’s just not somewhere you could stay sane for more than a short stint. But we thought - well, hey - we did like that scene overall so maybe we can just get our own bus. One that was really our home that we could modify any way we wanted and make our own. And looking at buses got us looking at trailers and R.V.s and it turns out those are actually better for what we wanted to do because A) they are meant to be lived in so you don’t have to massively modify them, and B) they’re just lighter and leaner and sort of more cheaply made, hence they’re cheaper. Ha. No, but seriously. Buses are a mother fucker - they’re like stout fucking tanks, which makes sense if you’re gonna rumble around the country in them. But for us we just wanted something to park at our friends house and nest in. We did not want to drive around or campground hop or see the country or do anything of the sort. We were gonna treat it more like a tiny home.

So anyway, yeah - R.V.s and shit. There was some really interesting shit online and some units are just fucking gigantic. We were scouring online listings and Facebook groups and having conversations with our friends in Maine, and also our friends in Arizona and we even reached out to Kris’ cousin in Montana - because it wasn’t just obtain an R.V./bus….it was where the fuck are we going to put it??

Out of the three places, they all had their drawbacks, but Maine just had a lot more going for it and had the massive pro of being somewhere we were already familiar with. Arizona or Montana would’ve been totally new scenes and we weren’t really looking for an adventure, you know what I mean?

It still seemed logistically challenging like….how we would get a fucking camper all the way to Maine and how would we even go and look at any as they were all in different states and just it was all super overwhelming. But then. We saw a listing for a trailer with one of the best floor plans….and it just so happened to be at a dealer that was 30 miles away from our friends house in Maine. We sent them the listing, they went and looked at it the next day, and within 24 hours we had been approved for financing and it was done. We had less than two weeks in Rockford and would be heading straight to Maine to have a camper delivered.

Like. What the fucking actual? Then we had to let our Airbnb host know that we were actually not staying thru the end of March. It was such a fucking roller coaster. And we took lots of manic walks with lots of talking and plotting and scheming and ultimately decided that yes, going to Maine was the right choice for now.

And it was weird too because we were really starting to like Rockford and could really see ourselves there. Did I mention it’s such a goddamn roller coaster? I can’t wait to be over this financial hump where we really have choices are not just “making the best of things”. But at the same time it was like - okay, well if we’re doing this then let’s fucking do it and let’s get into and have a good time with it. So we did. We started looking at R.V. renovation blogs and instagram accounts and getting excited to actually have our own home and not be in a rental or an Airbnb. It also meant we could have our stuff shipped from my dad’s house where it had been stored this whole time. And it just meant the end of this chapter, which we really were done with.

But also - we still had time left in Rockford and in this insane house so we very much milked that last bit of time in 2500 square feet before going to live in a fucking trailer. Rockford is known as “the forest city” because there are just shit tons of green spaces. The snow was melting so we were able to easily get out more and go on walks along the river in Sinnissippi Gardens & Park, and just all thru their cute downtown. We also went to Beyer Stadium, which was the home of the Rockford Peaches. We were still frequenting The Norwegian and getting the best food ever. And doing a shit ton of cooking at home in that awesome kitchen. We also both had gotten health insurance and had a really nice time seeing several different doctors while we were here and just having very small town experiences - everyone is so goddamn nice here, I love the midwest. Oh, and! The cutest little squirrel starting come up on the backyard ledge every day and I started leaving it little chunks of peanut butter toast and it was just about the cutest fucking thing of all time. Also the bird activity is just off the chain. I’m really going to miss that and this amazing backyard.

So yeah, here we are, just a couple of dipshits going to live on a trailer in Maine.

New Years in Rockford // Mid Century Dream House {Jan & Feb 2022}