Five years ago, I did what many people of all ages dream of doing - I ran away from home. Not only that, but I destroyed my home so there was no going back. It's called fulltime RVing - get rid of your clutter, find a vehicle you can both travel and live in, and wander around to wherever you feel inclined to visit. I can't say that it has been all roses, but it sure beats sitting around for your retirement years.
In exchange for having a small house, you get a big yard - an ever-changing yard that can be the beach, the mountains, the desert, family and friends' driveways when you're feeling sociable - whatever you want. And you CAN do something about the weather - you can go someplace where it's better.
I was lucky, the only home we had owned had been sold before the 2008 crash, and we were renting because my job in the new town was iffy, so it was just a matter of giving all our non-essential stuff to people with sticks and bricks houses - furniture, house plants, all that stuff. We stored maybe a dozen boxes containing documents, memorabilia, the good china, and a few other things in my sister's attic. Everything else we now own is with us as we travel.
We had settled for an easy-to-drive campervan, but there were technological challenges - unless you want to be tethered to an electrical cord and a water supply, you need to have what's called boondocking capability, the ability to run all systems with nothing more required than a reasonably level place to park. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate - sitting in some commercial campground surrounded by vacationing children, a few traveling frat parties, and whatever else pulled in off the road that evening, and they're all twenty feet out your door. Not for us. We wanted to operate out in the open public lands, doing dispersed camping and moving on when the neighbors got close enough to see their chimney smoke.
I started out five years ago with a Chevy chassis already upfitted for camping but with extensive modifications I put in before we left - 555 watts of solar panels, extra batteries, and a large inverter to make household current off the 12 volt power stored in the batteries to run the appliances, which included satellite internet and TV. It was ugly, but it worked - we would go months without plugging in, and spend weeks in places where nobody else could even overnight, but because of the homebrew nature of the setup, operating it was complicated.
After three years of this, the manufacturer who had made my RV in the first place took notice, and started slipping me stuff - a second alternator to replace the noisy smelly generator and feed the batteries directly, a massive reorganization of the mounting of the propane tank, spare tire, and other large heavy things so i could climb in off the ledge of the chassis weight limit, which I was in danger of exceeding if I went through the buffet twice, stuff like that. In exchange, I was the test pilot for these new systems, done by real engineers instead of a person with a lot of enthusiasm but no experience. Their stuff worked better than mine, and in exchange they got data on how it did or didn't work.
Last year I spent a few months hanging around the factory, helping with stuff like the manuals and customer repairs, and swapped my Chevy for a newer Mercedes chassis, which we built from the ground up with some bleeding-edge technology they needed usage data on, and I was anxious to try out - lithium batteries of staggering capacity, a hydronic heating/hot water system which burns propane to heat a glycol solution circulating through radiators and the floor, and a special under-the-floor air conditioner which runs straight off the batteries, meaning the roof is freed up to pave with solar. Plus some other stuff we can't talk about because it's not in production yet. So here I am, hard at work field testing all this new equipment. I wanted to live a simple retired life, but they're making it difficult for me.