Friendships on the Road

Note from Shelly: This is a very welcome guest post! We met Tom and Amy at the Airstream rally this past fall. (They’ve been living full-time in their trailer for the past two years; they lived on a boat before that.) We talked about this topic at a brewery yesterday in Santa Fe.

It’s tough to maintain friendships when you hit the road. All those relationships you left behind get, well, left behind. At first I thought I’d stay more connected with friends when we started traveling, thanks to social media, email, texting and even video hangouts. What I soon realized is that we all live individual lives, and we think about other people a lot less often when the threads that bind us stretch over longer distances with fewer intersection points. We quickly become out-of-site and out-of-mind. The social media posts are more like postcards from the road than meaningful conversations.

My friends at “home” are busy living their own lives. They have houses to maintain, neighbors they talk with, social connections that are close by, volunteering, routine visits to the same grocery store — life. Normal life. That became readily apparent when I set up a few virtual coffee meetings with long-time friends — we simply have a lot less in common now.

As a result, living a wandering lifestyle can sometimes feel lonely. Your old, even long-term, relationships are harder to maintain, and it’s nearly impossible to form new friendships when you are in a place for a few days, or even a few weeks.

So, when you do make a connection with someone, it’s like winning the lottery. It feels like you’ve finally beaten the odds after dozens or hundreds of campground conversations. If you’ve spent much time in a campground, you’ll relate to that old joke about trying to meet/date someone in a small town: “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

After a few months of traveling full-time I developed a new skillset: quickly determining if someone is “our people.” There are clues. The conversation quickly feels natural. It’s apparent you have shared values, or at least similar value systems. There are some common interests beyond destinations, dealing with poop and maintenance. Talking with someone you just met falls into a rhythm reminiscent of a decades-old friendship. It starts comfortably and stays comfortable.

There are times when my instincts are a little off. I think, “they’re our people,” but by the third conversation we’re talking about the weather. It was nice to meet you, but we don’t need to stay in touch.

Yet the odds are sometimes in our favor. And when they are, I feel special. Like someone gifted me a traveler’s reward of meaningful social interaction to accompany the amazing vistas and experiences with Mother Nature. We find our people. We stay in touch, long after the few days when we happened to be in the same place. We learn more about each other through social posts, blogs, texts and emails. We share tips, commiserate about challenges, and get excited when it looks like our paths will cross again on the road. 

Such connections are rare, and therefore all the more valuable when they do happen. Wandering friendships are cherished and nurtured. We have traveling in common, yet so much more as well. Traveling is what brings us together initially, and friendship brings us together again in the future.

Shelly here again: Tom and I think so much alike on this topic that I had to change his post title, because I had already written a post called, “Maintaining Friendships on the Road.” I sure hope we run into them again soon.