The Week we Decided we Needed a Camper

October 2024. I’d had Whitey for two weeks.

Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is barely enough time to learn which way the harness buckles without thinking about it. Two weeks is definitely not enough time to learn a village with no sidewalks, no street signs that matter, and a sun that stops being a reliable compass the second autumn decides to show up.

But that’s a different story. Let’s back up.

Joro was building a dome. Not figuratively. An actual dome, for an actual woman who wanted one, in a village called Malka Zhelyazna, with a crew run by a friend we’d known since festival years — and from before that too, eight years before, on a mountain trip neither of us had any business surviving. Joro joined the crew. I stayed in Sofia, because I’m a QA specialist, and the entire point of being a QA specialist is that I can work from literally anywhere with wifi.

Anywhere with wifi. That’s the joke. Hold that thought.

The crew rented a room near the site. It had space for a dog. One dog. Which was fine, in theory, except our household was never going to send one dog anywhere.

We had Karma, retired by then, who’d earned the right to nap wherever she wanted. We had Frida, mother from the breeding program, who came with her own opinions about everything. And we had Whitey, brand new, still learning that I was hers to guide and not the other way around.

Three dogs. One room built for one.

We went anyway. Once. The whole unruly pack of us, descending on this rental like a weather event. By day two we had dug up the landlady’s flowers — not me, I should clarify, though I take no responsibility for who specifically did it. By day three, someone was missing from the yard. Repeatedly. We got very familiar, very fast, with the particular sound of a landlady deciding she’d had enough.

And Whitey — sweet, brand new, two-weeks-old-on-the-job Whitey — had very clear opinions about her new responsibilities, and “lead the blind woman through an unmarked village with no sidewalks” was not yet one of them. I tried navigating by the sun, the way I usually do. Turns out autumn doesn’t respect that particular life hack. The sun moves, the shadows lie, and a street that’s supposedly one straight line with two turns somehow produces a third turn that exists nowhere except in my actual path. I ended up in the middle of the square more than once. I was running Dotwalker that whole week just to find my way back to the room. Joro climbed down off the scaffolding more than once to come find me, which is a sentence that tells you everything about how that week was going.

The Room Ran Out

So that lasted exactly one stay. The next time I was supposed to go, Joro called and said, basically: so, a new guy joined the crew, and he’s in the room now, and there’s no space.

A new colleague. Not the one with the camper — that’s a different guy, more on him in a second. Just someone who needed the one dog-sized spot we’d briefly occupied like a small invading nation.

And here’s the part that actually got me: I work from anywhere. That’s supposed to be the whole advantage. I don’t need an office, I don’t need a desk, I need a laptop and a connection, and theoretically that means I can be anywhere Joro is. Except apparently “anywhere” doesn’t include “wherever there happens to be a free room,” because rooms, it turns out, are a finite resource controlled by other people’s schedules and other people’s flowers.

I could work from anywhere. I just couldn’t be with the person I loved.

Around the same time, a different new guy showed up on site. Came with his own camper. Two small dogs, living in it with him, completely unbothered by the lack of available rental rooms because he’d brought his own room, on wheels, attached to nothing but his own schedule.

I remember looking at that thing and thinking: oh. Oh, that’s the answer.

It was just the very moment of realization that everyone else’s logistics depended on a landlady’s patience and a finite number of bedrooms, and his didn’t.

My birthday was about a week out. And somewhere between “I should treat myself” and “do I actually deserve a whole vehicle as a birthday present” and “wait, this isn’t really about deserving anything, this is about literally not being able to live near my own partner” — I stopped negotiating with myself and started looking.

One week of research. A genuinely stressful week, full of back-and-forth on whether to buy at all, and if so, which one. We went to see three campers in person. We argued, compared, hesitated, and eventually picked one — the full story of that decision is its own mess, worth its own article.

We Bought a Camper Instead

We bought it on November 15th, 2024. About a month after Whitey came home. About three weeks after I stood in the middle of a square in Malka Zhelyazna, completely lost, waiting for someone to come find me.

It was simply freedom. The end of needing someone else’s spare room to exist near the person I loved.