![]() A bone-deep conviction that something better will come. A sense of opportunity as wide as the country itself. You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels? Decisions like: Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?įor many, the answer seemed radical at first. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate” - vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. But now, in the third millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. There have always been itinerants, drifters, hobos, restless souls. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a 72-year-old van dweller who cracked three ribs doing a campground maintenance job is recuperating while visiting with family. In a few weeks, they’ll switch to selling Christmas trees. In San Marcos, California, a 30-something couple in a 1975 GMC motorhome is running a roadside pumpkin stand with a children’s carnival and petting zoo, which they had five days to set up from scratch on a vacant dirt lot. After the funding for her position ran out, she couldn’t afford rent on top of paying off student loans. Losing her job at a nonprofit several years ago is one of the reasons she moved into the trailer in the first place. She knows the sugar beet harvest is hiring, but traveling halfway across the country would require more cash than she has. Even with a master’s degree, the 38-year-old Nebraska native can’t find a job despite filling out hundreds of applications in the past month alone. In New Bern, North Carolina, a woman whose home is a teardrop-style trailer - so small it can be pulled with a motorcycle - is couch surfing with a friend while hunting for work. At night he sleeps in the van that is his home. He works from sunrise until after sunset in temperatures that dip below freezing, helping trucks that roll in from the fields disgorge multi-ton loads of beets. In Drayton, North Dakota, a former San Francisco cabdriver, 67, labors at the annual sugar beet harvest. The New Nomads: Living Full-Time on the Road (Shutterstock)
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