A week after returning from Cancún, we packed the car and drove to Nevada.
This wasn't really a vacation.
The Irvine house was for sale, and we needed to answer a practical question:
If we sold it, where were we going to live?
Nevada made sense for a number of reasons. We could establish residency there, it was close enough to California and the western states, and Las Vegas had an international airport that could make it a useful base for traveling.
But there was a more basic question.
Would we actually like living there?
Green Valley
We started at Green Valley Ranch in Henderson.
We toured neighborhoods and looked at homes in Summerlin, Henderson and Lake Las Vegas. We considered both buying and renting.
We also started investigating all the mundane infrastructure we'd need if we no longer had the Irvine house—where we'd store the Audi, where we'd keep the things we weren't ready to get rid of, and how we'd handle the periods when we were traveling.
For the first time, the idea of leaving Irvine was becoming less abstract.
We weren't simply selling a house.
We were trying to figure out what would replace it.
What Kind of Home Did We Need?
The houses we looked at raised another question.
How much home did we actually need?
We expected to spend much of the year traveling. We didn't need another large house sitting empty while we were gone.
Maybe we needed a condo.
Maybe an apartment.
Maybe we should rent rather than buy.
Or maybe what we really needed was simply a legal home base, some storage and somewhere comfortable to stay when we happened to be in the United States.
We didn't know yet.
That was why we were there.
Las Vegas
Partway through the trip, we moved from Green Valley Ranch to the Four Seasons on the Strip.
The contrast was useful.
The Four Seasons was lovely, but the surrounding environment was completely different.
Las Vegas had energy, restaurants, entertainment and activity everywhere.
Green Valley was quieter.
And we realized that quieter suited us better.
We didn't need to live in the middle of the action just because we could.
No Answer Yet
By the end of the trip, we hadn't found the house we wanted to buy.
More importantly, we weren't convinced we needed to buy one at all.
That was probably the more useful discovery.
For most of our adult lives, the sequence had been obvious:
Sell one house.
Buy another.
Move your belongings.
Establish the next home.
But now that sequence didn't seem quite as inevitable.
We could rent.
We could store the car.
We could store some possessions.
We could establish Nevada residency.
And then we could travel.
Maybe we didn't need to know where our next permanent home would be.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember driving around Henderson, Summerlin and Lake Las Vegas trying to imagine ourselves living there.
We'll remember looking at homes while simultaneously wondering whether buying another home made any sense.
We'll remember investigating storage for the car and our belongings—ordinary logistical details that made the possibility of a very different life suddenly seem workable.
We'll remember moving from quiet Green Valley Ranch to the Four Seasons and realizing that, despite all the attractions of Las Vegas, we preferred being somewhere calmer.
And we'll remember leaving Nevada without having answered the question we'd gone there to answer.
Would We Live There?
Maybe.
Nevada still made sense as a home base.
Henderson appealed to us more than living on or near the Strip, and we could imagine being comfortable there.
But the trip changed the question.
We had arrived asking:
Where should we buy our next house?
We left wondering:
Do we need another house yet?
We drove back to Irvine.
The house was still ours.
For now.