H Is For Huh?

During April, we're participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day (except Sundays), we’ll be doing an alphabet themed post starting with “A is for Adventurous” and ending with “Z is for Zinc”. We've got a theme for every letter sorted except for Y. If you have any ideas for the letter Y, please leave a comment or email. 
 
As we’ve been traveling around, first on a sailboat in New Zealand and now in a travel trailer in the States, one of the most common questions we get asked is where we’re from. People assume that you must have a home base somewhere. They seem very confused when we tell them that we have no fixed abode. They kind of stare at us blankly and go “Huh?” Thinking we’re perhaps a bit stupid or dense, they’re rephrase the question and ask us where we live. Again, we tell them that we live wherever our sailboat or travel trailer happens to be at the moment. If you’re a full-time cruiser or RVer, then you’ll get it. But if you’re the type of person who lives in a proper house, in “sticks and bricks” with a street address that isn’t a PO Box or mail forwarding service, then you might be utterly perplexed at the idea of not having a permanent base.

The whole concept of having no fixed abode really came home to us when we were sailing in New Zealand and had to pull our boat out of the water to have it inspected for the invasive Mediterranean fanworm. It’s a really long story (which you can read about here), but the upshot is that the local council served us with official papers notifying us that we had to be inspected. The council officer was so perplexed that we didn’t have a fixed address to put on the forms. I think he asked us four or five times before he realized that our boat was our address. It was pretty hysterical to see the official form list us as “Scott and Ellen of no fixed address.” I don’t think it was until that moment that I really realized how completely we had embraced a nomadic lifestyle. 

To be honest, sometimes the conversations get too complicated and hard when we meet people who want to know where we’re from, so we often just answer that we’re from Oregon. Which is kind of true – it’s where we last lived in “sticks and bricks” when we resided in the States. That answer seems to satisfy most people. If we’re feeling particularly chatty, then sometimes we’ll respond that we’re permanent residents of New Zealand traveling around the States looking for a sailboat. But then, they’ll usually look confused and say, “Huh?”
 

What about you? Are you a “sticks and bricks” person with a proper street address or do you lead a nomadic life with no fixed abode?

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