The Friendly Skies: Socializing in Santa Fe

After three and a half months on the road, we are so happy to have adopted this lifestyle. We are living life on our own schedule, seeing wonderful parts of the country, eating interesting food and meeting great people. When asked what we miss most from our old life, invariably we say "our friends". Before leaving San Diego we enjoyed an active social life, living in a very friendly and warm condo community, never short of things to do and people to hang out with. Now that we are on the road things are different.  We have to adapt to a new way of socializing. 

We find each other hilarious! 

Iain and I are pretty sociable people, quite extrovert, and love to chat and swap stories. We especially like laughing. We are lucky to find each other funny... most of the time! We joke around, do silly voices and sing funny songs all the time. To each other we think we are hilarious! We can often be caught doing stupid dances either in the Airstream or between the aisles in the store and don't care as long as it's funny. But hanging out with other people and hearing their stories, connecting with their experiences and sharing our tales of mishaps and adventures is great too. We are learning that you can develop a sense of camaraderie and community on the road but in a different way. Most of the new connections we are making and maintaining are online.

Last week began with a flurry of social activity. First a friend who, like us, is newly nomadic noticed via Facebook that we were passing through Colorado where he had spent the month. We arranged to meet up for a drink in Santa Fe while he was passing through.  He is living the nomad life a little differently to us, renting properties in cool places for a month or so at a time.  It was great to swap stories of how things were going a few months into our new lifestyles.  

Getting to know Tim & Amanda

Santa Fe also gave us the opportunity to meet up with Tim and Amanda,who blog as Watsons Wander.  We had been following their excellent blog for a while. Amanda writes great articles and we learned so much from them as we prepared to hit the road. We discovered, again via Facebook, that they were heading to the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque so we reached out to say hi.  It turned out we both planned on staying at Santa Fe Skies for the few days before Fiesta and had the chance to meet.  They generously offered to cook dinner one night and we hosted them for a follow up a few nights later.  It was really great to meet in person and share travel stories over dinner.  We arranged to rendezvous in Albuquerque a few days later so we could park together at the Balloon Fiesta. The socializing continued through the event but more on that in the next post.  

We started this blog for several reasons; to keep our friends and family informed of what we were up to and as our own travel journal to keep track of where we've been on our journey. But another reason for blogging is to be part of a community who have chosen this lifestyle. Pre-retirement age people who have decided it's more important to add experiences to their lives rather than things. Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and RVillage, as well as all the wonderful blogs out there, have allowed us the opportunity to feel part of that community. I am a bit behind on blogging after the Balloon Fiesta, but for all the best reasons. More stories on meeting wonderful nomads in the upcoming Albuquerque post (oh there will be Balloons and Breaking Bad too)!