We Travel with Our Home: An Autistic Escape from Overwhelm
My Roaming Sensory Bubble: How an RV Makes Travel Possible for Me & Why I Had to Say No to My First Keynote in Years
Some of you may not know this about me (especially since so many new faces have joined me over the past year alone), but (pre-2020) I used to travel across the United States speaking at conferences and in-person events, teaching the world about NeuroDiversity and Neuro-Inclusion.
In the pre-pandemic days, giving workshops online was less accepted than it is now, and I used to hop on buses and planes to travel around to teach, but these days I rarely travel, fly, or speak at in-person events.
Teaching over the internet (via video calls) has been much easier on me, since my personal Autistic experience means traveling through airports and sleeping in unfamiliar hotels, and visiting places where my safe foods are less easy to find is hard on me.
Back when I used to travel to speak, I would frequently find myself exhausted, needing more days to recover from these trips than I actually spent traveling.
During my travels, I often felt sick and overwhelmed (forcing me to give presentations unrested due to not being able to sleep in strange places, feeling ragged from the stressful travels, and sometimes ill from sensory overload and hypervigilance).
Flying wasn’t good to me, and neither were the strange hotels, even though I loved traveling and seeing new places.
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Since then, David and I have fallen in love with RV travel, driving from place to place with our home, like a turtle or a snail, carrying everything we need to stay rested and comfortable wherever we go.
Our RV is like a roaming sensory bubble, a place we can retreat to and rest when the road wears us down.
Traveling with an RV means we can live on groceries instead of eating out and have all our safe foods packed away and ready when we need to be nourished. It also allows us to sleep in our own bed and maintain a sense of routine, even when traveling - something I need to feel at ease in my life.
The road can be chaotic, but when we have our home with us, it serves as an anchor, making the chaos manageable.
We don’t travel like most people do.
We have four dogs, and try not to drive more than 4 hours at a time (so they, and we, don’t end up crammed in a small space for too many hours in a day).
We also travel cheaply. We don’t eat out at restaurants, pay for campgrounds, or visit other paid tourist attractions (unless there’s something very special we want to see, or we find something very low or reasonable in price).
Central Texas has become an expensive place to live.
For us, being on the road (if done correctly) can be cheaper than living back home (near Austin, Texas, where studio apartments can easily be over $1000 a month before utilities).
Most of the time, we camp in free wild camping spots with no amenities, allowing us to stay for up to two weeks at a time, avoiding places that don’t offer free wilderness camping. When nothing of the sort can be found, we will sleep at truck stops, Cracker Barrels, and Walmart parking lots (to avoid paying camping fees).
We get to a location and stay in a relatively small area for weeks, sometimes months, at a time, trying to pick a spot with easy access to groceries and other supplies we may need.
We also travel with the weather; staying in places we won’t need AC or heat during the day is another way we keep our costs low.
Over the years, we’ve gotten good at travel (and even better at keeping our costs low).
Travel has gotten so easy for us that I have even started considering accepting in-person speaking gigs again for the first time in years (since we can now travel more comfortably with our home) - as long as they’re in areas I feel safe in and know we will be able to travel without paying for camping every night. The “areas I feel safe in“ is a big part of that.
In reality, under the current regime, there are many places I don’t feel safe traveling (or even driving through).
I also don’t feel safe announcing somewhere I plan to be weeks or months in advance right now (because of how many people have threatened violence against me in recent months).
