Every month, I’ll tell you what happened two months ago. This post is about October 2010, where I moved from my house and quite luxurious matrix life to my tent in the garden of my friends.

Many of the perceived difficult tasks in life are actually a piece of cake when you get to them. And sometimes the simplest things can be really complicated.

The first days
I was prepared like I never prepared myself before. I think that if I had tried to control every aspect of this pretty big step, then I would have aborted the mission. ‘Closing’ down a house, isn’t really a fun job to do. The last days, your once cozy home is increasingly getting empty. It causes pain. Between these emotions you have to keep thinking logical and practical. Basically I went from having a full sized house with a ton of stuff to a complete life fitting in the trunk of my car in under two months.

Mini Ice Age
The visions I have had for this winter are anything but warm. My gear basically allowed me to sleep outside in subsequent -5°C nights in October. That would have been extraordinary cold for the time of the year, but frequent readers know I believe in in the Mini-Ice-Age. But instead it froze only 1/one night to -1°C, and was absurdly warm: 8°C average at night. Good for me, but maybe a sign?

Unloading the trunk
Setting up a tent is one of those ‘easy’ things you can do, but that can appear to be really complicated once you get to live in it. The first night was a dream night. I drove my car up the driveway of my friend’s place. Unloaded my tent, pitched it up and 50 minutes later I was sleeping. I did ask myself the rhetorical question: “what in the world are you doing dude?”. The answer came in the next 45 days.

My guest family
It was surprising how quick everyone got used to the idea of having a gnome in a tent in the garden. My friend, his girlfriend and her two kids were probably the best guest family you’ll find here. I was very surprised how fast the kids got used to me. I tried to mingle inside the family as much as I could, trying to make myself as invisible as possible. I helped out where I could, and of course I’ve learned a lot living in between them, both about myself, them and the human psyche in general.

Inspiration
It’s by living in between these fine people I realized that this was the most ideal way of traveling around the world. It’s cost efficient, it’s self-confronting, it let’s me meet the local culture up close, and it’s relatively safe too. This could be it. It’s not much, but such a spark is enough to ignite pretty big ideas in that head of mine.

Asset liquidation
Although the target was to have everything fit my trunk before moving out of my house, I had to move everything I had left in two times. So the next sunny weekend, I put everything outside on the driveway and chopped it up in two parts: stay and go. Fortunately the part ‘go’ was big enough, so everything then fitted in the trunk of my car.

Job’s done here
Around the same time my boss decided to fire me, and I’m thankful he did. So everything magically came together. Without any planning. This was what I suspected and predicted would happen. My life had been taken on…

Autopilot
During October it was becoming increasingly clear that I didn’t need to do much worrying at all, just go with the flow. The world trip would pretty much organize itself, and the timing wasn’t much to worry about either.

Thanks
I really want to thank my friend, his girlfriend and the two kids for the magical time I had there.  But it wasn’t over, I needed to start looking for a place to stay for the mini-ice-age winter. But asocial beings people are here, my search for a place to co-rent was tougher than I thought.

And then November started with me being arrested and doing some jail time…

(Traditionally, the first of January is reserved here for the 2011 predictions, that’s why the next episode of this diary will appear a little later in January 2011.)