I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to work from an RV.
It happened almost by accident.
Last year, one of my best friends from college invited me to Joshua Tree for about ten days. He had a few other friends coming too, and I went out there thinking I was going on a real vacation. No office, no routine, no sitting behind the same desk every day.
At least that was the plan.
One afternoon we were sitting out in the desert just taking everything in when my phone started buzzing. Calls. Texts. Notifications.
My first thought was, Crap. Even out here I have signal.
I had gone all the way into the desert thinking I was finally somewhere work couldn’t find me, and apparently I was wrong. But after being annoyed about it for a minute, I started thinking about it differently.
If my phone worked out there, maybe my laptop would too.
The next day I packed a chair, my laptop, my phone, a USB battery, some water and food into a backpack and walked about a mile and a half into the desert. There wasn’t much more of a plan than that.
I found a spot I liked, put the chair down, opened the laptop and started working.
And something happened that I really wasn’t expecting.
I enjoyed work again.
Not because the job had changed. The meetings were still there. The emails were still there. Everything I normally had to do was still waiting for me. But I felt different doing it.
I was relaxed. I could focus. I wasn’t getting distracted by everything around the house. I had energy. Even going into meetings felt different.
For the first time in a while, work didn’t feel like the exact same day being repeated over and over.
That stuck with me.
I know sitting in a desert isn’t going to magically make work exciting forever. Eventually any routine becomes a routine. But I realized something important that day.
The work might stay the same, but the view doesn’t have to.
Before I left Joshua Tree, I told my buddy that I was coming back the next year with an off-road trailer.
I’m pretty sure he thought I was just talking. Honestly, I might have been dreaming a little myself. But I also knew I meant it.
The idea followed me home.
At first I pictured something small. Just enough room for me to sleep, work and cook something. I didn’t think I needed much more than that.
Then my wife started getting interested.
Once that happened, the idea changed. If this was eventually going to be something we could do together, I wanted it to be comfortable enough that she would actually enjoy it too. That meant a real bathroom, a shower, air conditioning and enough room that we weren’t climbing over each other all day.
Eventually the two of us drove down to South Carolina to look at trailers.
We climbed inside one, turned on the air conditioning and just stayed there. We probably laid there for close to an hour.
That’s the moment I remember thinking, Okay, we’re really doing this.
It wasn’t just something I had talked about while sitting in the desert anymore.
There’s another reason all of this became important to me.
A few years ago, I was in a bad motorcycle accident.
I had a severe concussion, multiple surgeries on my leg and a recovery that took months. There was a point where moving around normally wasn’t something I could take for granted anymore.
Experiences like that change the way you think about time.
Everybody knows life can change in a second. We all say it. It’s different when you actually live through the second that changes yours.
After that, time started feeling less like something that would always be there and more like something I needed to pay attention to.
I’m 53 now, and I’ve started thinking seriously about retirement. But the accident made me question this idea that I should wait until retirement to start doing the things I really want to do.
Why wait?
Why wait to travel? Why wait to go to concerts, go out to dinner, spend more time with friends, spend more time with family?
I probably spent too much time working when my kids were younger. I can’t go back and change that. I can only decide what I do with the time I have now.
That’s where this trip fits in.
Working from home has been good to me. I’m lucky I can do it. But it also slowly turned me into someone who sits too much.
Same desk. Same office. Same view.
You can go an entire workday without really moving anywhere.
That’s the strange thing about remote work. It gives you all this freedom, but if you’re not careful, you can end up using that freedom to sit in the same room every day.
Joshua Tree showed me another possibility.
Maybe I can still do the job I enjoy and change what happens around it. Maybe one week I’m looking at the desert. Maybe another week I’m in the woods. Maybe I finish work and instead of walking from my office to the couch, I go outside and walk somewhere I’ve never been before.
That’s a big part of what I’m hoping to get out of this.
I want to move more. I want to see more. I want my days to stop feeling quite so repetitive.
And I want to find out whether I can start living some of the life I imagined for retirement before I actually retire.
There’s also something kind of funny about doing it now.
When I retire, I want to travel. Right now, I can travel and still get paid.
That’s a pretty good deal.
I still have to work. I still have responsibilities. This isn’t some permanent vacation where I open the laptop for twenty minutes and then go hiking all day.
But if I can do my job from somewhere I actually want to be, why wouldn’t I try?
My wife won’t be coming on this first big trip, but that doesn’t mean this is just my thing. She’s becoming a bigger part of what I’m imagining for the future, and I’m really looking forward to doing more of this together.
For now, though, I’m the test case.
I have absolutely no idea whether I’m going to love this.
That might be my favorite part.
Maybe working and living out of a trailer will be everything I hope it is. Maybe I’ll get tired of dealing with water, power, internet, campsites and towing. Maybe after a few weeks I’ll be ready to get back to my regular desk.
I really don’t know. And I don’t want to pretend that I do.
That’s what The Desk Out There is really about.
I’m not writing this because I’ve figured out some great secret about how to live. I’m writing it because I want to try something different while I still have the chance.
I want to see what happens.
And maybe somebody reading along will decide there’s something they’ve been putting off too.
It doesn’t have to involve a trailer. It doesn’t have to involve traveling across the country.
It just has to be something that gets you out of the habit of always waiting for later.
Because later isn’t guaranteed.
— The Guy Behind the Desk
