More Mobile: Less Mobile? (Premium)

Last September, I wrote about my experiments with more mobile computing setups, and over time, I expanded that into a series of articles that described how I transitioned from a desktop PC setup to a portable PC setup and then took it on the road. I learned a lot during this, but more importantly, to me, I am surprised to report that I enacted real change. I now prefer this more mobile setup to what I had done before, literally dating back to my first PC in the early 1990s.

I’m still kind of amazed by that. But what I’d like to discuss here is the reasons for this shift and how that had changed over the past year.

Like many of you, I was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in ways I probably still don’t understand. I overate and overdrank, I lost sleep, I worried constantly for the safety and sanity of my family and my country, and I questioned everything. Including, of course, what was really important.

What one considers important will vary by person. But my wife and I had long planned to someday split time between two places, that someday being a vague future time when the kids were out of the house and we were free to become, well, more mobile. And the pandemic drove home the notion that someday could easily become no day because of fear and uncertainty. And that maybe it was time to start taking steps to make this future happen. After all, our kids were both in college at the time, and now, in 2022, our son is done with college and our daughter is about to finish her second year.

I spent a good chunk of 2020, that horrible year when travel was basically impossible, researching possibilities. For example, I looked at the so-called RV life because my wife and I had discussed possibly spending a year someday watching a baseball game in every Major League park and seeing the country that way. But after getting pretty deep into the specifics, and even looking at a few RVs, we both agreed that this life wasn’t for us. For many reasons, really, but it doesn’t matter.

As you probably know, we spent many years traveling to Europe, and from 2006 through 2019, we spent at least three weeks each summer there with the kids doing a home swap. Paris was, is, and will probably always be my favorite overall destination, but my wife has a preference for Barcelona, which I also love. And we have of course discussed and researched the possibility of moving to Europe or at least splitting our time between there and the U.S. But that was always going to be tough. Europe is incredibly expensive and there are serious immigration barriers. And since it was always in the future---someday---we never took steps in that direction.

So I researched that during the pandemic as well. And it just seemed daunting on so many levels. Plus, Europe doesn’t solve another issue that’s becoming more problematic as I get older: it has the same weather extremes that we’ve experienced in Boston and, more recently, in Pennsylvania. I can’t stand ...