As I am winding down my time in Hawaii I want to put my intentions for the next year out into the world. Writing them down to share might help keep me on track, or inspire collaboration or advice, or …

Hawaii - July and August 2021

Barring some unlikely last resort options bearing fruit soon, my efforts to buy property in Hawaii are winding down. Over the next two months I’ll be trying to sell most of the extra stuff I brought or bought down here (solar panels, tractor, van, car, furniture, etc) and packing to ship a much smaller load back to the mainland. I expect to hand off the lease of the house in Kona to one of a few friends who have visited and are coming back and want to stay here long term. If that goes well, I’ll have a place to crash here should I visit again in the future, alone or with friends.

Los Angeles - Late August 2021

I recently purchased a large tour bus / coach near Los Angeles. When I return from Hawaii to California I’ll need to quickly deal with the initial logistics of that purchase and the future plans for it. I expect to fly into LA, spend a couple of days doing a rough sparse conversion on the bus (remove most seats, install kitchenette and bed), then register the vehicle as a housecar / motorhome and upgrade my license from a noncommercial C to a noncommercial B with 45ft housecar endorsement. What I really want is a commercial A, so I can carry passengers for money, but that has a mandatory 14 day waiting period and some other logistical requirements that I can’t squeeze into this step of the plan so it can wait a bit longer. With that taken care of, I’ll probably pick up a few friends who want to carpool north and set out for the bay area.

Bay Area - September to December 2021

Work wants me to be in Mountain View three days a week (Tue/Wed/Thu) starting September 1. I also want this, because remote onboarding hasn’t been going well, and I’d like to rack up some face time with my colleagues. Separately, I want to experience and take advantage of all the perks of tech-y office life while I have the chance.

I will be living in my bus somewhere near Mountain View during the week so I have a short walk or bike to the office, and spending weekends elsewhere, mostly in the bay area, with remote work in the daytime on Monday and Friday. In the new bus I’ll be a lot more graffiti-avoidant than in my previous buses, so overnight parking options will be more constrained, but I still plan to spend most weekends somewhere more interesting than the peninsula.

This will also be the time in which I pursue doing a “fancy” conversion on the new bus. All of my previous conversions were more function than form, with a lot of exposed plywood and 2x4s, square corners, and standard household or garage furniture bolted into place. This time I am aiming for something more like a commercial RV or party bus, the sort of result you’d expect if you hired professionals to do a mid-five-figures conversion job. Rounded corners, custom built and fit benches and cabinets, visually appealing upholstery and decoration, etc. A comet from the east coast has expressed interest in collaborating on the interior design. A well informed friend has recommended Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale as a good makerspace that I might use for my fabrication projects. I’ll be doing a lot of metal work, welding, carpentry, woodwork, upholstering, electrical wiring and electronic gadgets, etc.

Festivals/etc - September to December 2021

While I have a normal day job mid-week, remote work for long weekends, and a bus to live and play in taking shape, I plan to get back into the habit of going to big events regularly. This conveniently mostly coincides with a lot of big events returning from year-or-longer hiatus periods. I’ll also be trying to get out for smaller scale activities, but that requires less planning months in advance. I’ll be filling in my calendar as I learn about more events, more events announce their schedules, and I coordinate with friends, but here’s a tentative list of stuff I’m 50%+ likely to attend:

September 3-6 not-Burning-Man in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno (not in the bus!)

October 10-18 http://everywhenproject.org/ in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles

Nov 12-15 http://darkodyssey.com/surrender/ (NSFW) in San Francisco

2022

Right now, things get fuzzier past the end of the year. However, by the start of the new year I hope to have a pretty good idea of how I plan to finish it.

Work has committed to making it possible for us to work from different offices, and my department has a presence in Atlanta and Boston, so I have some vague ideas of finishing the round-the-country road trip that I put on indefinite hold when I landed in San Francisco. Along the way I’d be spending some months or longer in one of those places, where I’ve lived before and have contacts and community to reconnect with.

There’s also the possibility of transitioning to full time remote work and going on the road for a while, in a new town or park every few days or weeks like I did back in 2015.

Either way, I plan to be taking what I’ve recently learned about shopping for real estate and coordinating people and money, then turning that into something big. I have an idea to pick the CoDwell name and concept back up, or to do something more commercial and profitable (like a b&b or campground or retreat center) and top-down with more specific goals and plans (rather than leaving it up to the participants to plan around their passions).

Beyond that… who knows?