Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

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Don’t despair—prepare.

I knew things had changed when, as we settled into the darkness of our pioneer wagon sleep cave for the night, Giavana suddenly raised up from her nest of pillows and smacked her hands together violently, scaring the bejesus out of half-asleep little Pia and me.

“What the heck was that about?” I asked.

“Spider,” she said calmly, getting up to wash her hands.

I sat in shock and awe as I watched her exit through the barn door toward the bathroom. A year and a half ago, when we started this pioneer life, the mere idea of a spider in close proximity would have sent my Italian former Playboy bunny city girl into hysterics.

It was an epiphany. Things have changed. There was further evidence the following weekend, as I went on a trip, leaving her behind in the covered wagon RV. It’s winter, and a damn cold January so far. While I was gone, a few typical malfunctions occurred. The furnace went out, and the water froze up. Incredibly, she dug in, troubleshot, and fixed both problems on her own. I guess she had to, survival and all that, but I was only a phone call away. She fended for herself, and I’m damn proud of that pioneer woman.

We’re working on survivalism, we’re preppers, and you need to become self-sufficient to survive. When the stuff hits the fan, you can’t simply call a repair person. You need to understand how electrical, plumbing, sewage, and other systems work at a fundamental level, and fix them yourself.

We’ve had some discussions lately, over cafe breakfasts and our favorite simple home-cooked dinner of chicken, onions, and peppers fried up in a pan of olive oil and wrapped in wheat tortillas with some excellent salsa.

If you go waaay back to Project: Pioneer #1 from August 2023, our original thesis for making this drastic change, selling all our stuff and moving into a small RV, had a few points such as:

* We were too spoiled in our big ol’ house with all that space we rarely used, filled with crap we rarely used, and yet paid to heat and air condition all year round.

* COVID and Trump v1 were wakeup calls. We saw a good chance another pandemic would occur, and perhaps Trump would return and this time achieve his lust to end our democracy and turn this country into a dystopian hellscape, perhaps start WWIII.

* A climate disaster or world war/nuclear strike would force us to flee, with no plan and no resources. Our home and land, a significant part of our overall net worth, could become worthless (or seized by an out of control autocratic government).

When I frequent the prepper communities, I see a lot of people reading the books, following the blogs, and piling up a lot of survival gear in their McMansions. If you’ve watched any of those reality shows where people are suddenly thrown into a dire survival situation, you’ll note that it’s a whole different ball game. You need practice.

So, we sold our house at market high, and moved into an apartment for a time as we sold off our things and formulated our plan. In August 2023 we pulled the trigger and moved into a (way too tiny) RV. A very simple, minimalist life, year-round. Dealing with extreme weather, predators, threatening and perhaps dangerous people out in the woods. We learned in our year and a half that we’re just fine in very, very close quarters (that’s amore!), and how to maintain our small covered wagon.

That box is checked, we feel. Our year-and-a-half-long special forces boot camp has served us well. We’re far more hardened than before. We feel we’re ready—far more ready than most, at least. I knew it the moment that spider bit the dust (although, I’m more of a catch and release type person—baby steps, Ms Giavana).

Along the way, my health has continued to decline. I had a heart procedure, causing Giavana to have to care for me here in our pioneer covered wagon. I didn’t like that, because I felt exposed. We were exposed. This life is hard enough. Now I’m due for two more surgeries this year, which will basically take away the use of my hands for most of the year, not good for pioneer life. I have a looming AAA (ascending aortic aneurysm) that could take me out in a moment’s notice.

And so, our decision. We’re keeping this beautiful rigged-out tiny home White House RV on standby, ready to hitch up and turn into our escape pod at a moment’s notice. This spring we’ll move into a quite small apartment, more tiny home living, but it will feel like palace for us. I’ll be near the hospital, crawling distance again. Good for survival. We’ll be able to store up far more food, water, and survival gear—a huge bonus. We’ll have access to our few remaining prized possessions—clothing, books, turntable/music again (those are in a very small storage unit), good for our mental health. They say a rolling stone gathers no moss. This will be around our tenth move in our years together, which don’t number much more than that, for reasons both known and likely unknown to us.

Make no mistake—we’re not bailing, we’re not quitting. We love this simple pioneer life. We love our cozy little home, which we are fully acclimated to. But, for all the reasons above and below, this is the more strategic decision. We can’t become complacent—we have to continue to explore and practice other aspects of what surviving in the future might entail. This move allows us to explore those other scenarios, and solves some pressing problems.

We’ll have options. If there’s a disaster, we’ll have strong shelter, perhaps enough to formulate a plan or just stay put. A fast, zero notice bug-out will entail taking our priority one items and stuffing them into the bed of Henrik the pickup truck, and bolting. A more dire and permanent looking scenario will entail the same, but hitching up the White House RV and bugging out. We like options. In any of those cases, we’ll be self-sufficient for quite some time, perhaps until help comes. Waiting for Godot, so to speak. We will be ready, because we practiced. We know this life.

I was always a bit concerned because we were exposed with our original phase. If a sudden disaster hit, such as an earthquake or tornado, and we had no time to leave, we’d have been in big trouble in this flimsy tin can. Now we have the best of both worlds in phase two. This is what concerns me about the homestead fixed-location preppers—if they’re forced out of their comfortable established hard-wired setup due to war conditions, climate disaster, or other, what’s Plan B? They’re kind of screwed—forced out into the open, the unknown, and very exposed.

So, the focus now goes to that new phase, along with our other priority one items—ham radio license and setup as well as learning indoor and outdoor small-space gardening, which we had zero room for in this RV life. We need to get to the shooting range more regularly. We will still be prepping, and from a perspective that will be much more relevant to many of you out there, so stay tuned! We already taught you all the RV stuff. But first, we have to make it through this cold unforgiving winter. Perhaps there are more lessons on the way. We also have a lot to look forward to. We’ve booked our trip out of the country to hopefully finalize our second citizenship—another escape-pod lever to pull in the coming dystopia. That one has been a lot of work and a long time coming. We like to have options.

In our current phase of pioneering, we’ve been pretty much fixed-location. We got to pr...

A Big Pioneer Prepper Decision