'There are plenty of real costs to this way of unplugging from the matrix. It has taken a time to get used to the idea that my home isn’t really mine,' writes winston_ross
A couple weeks ago, as I gathered some friends around my dining room table in Portland, Oregon, my phone lit up. It was an inquiry on the travel booking platform Airbnb, from a frazzled visitor looking for a place to stay after the host of the home she’d reserved abruptly canceled. Was mine available?
Sure, I wrote back. But it was 9 p.m., and I still needed to pack for a nine-day trip on Oregon’s John Day River the next day. Can you wait an hour? I asked.I’d have sent my guests home and dashed from room to room to snatch up clothes, food, and gear, stuff them into the car, quickly clean the house and figure out a place to sleep that night.
I tidied up, took a few photos of the northeast Portland house I’d purchased only a year earlier, created the listing and broadcast my living room to the world. At the apex of a golden Oregon summer, the bookings rolled in. Within a few days, my new home would be someone else’s, and someone else’s after that, through to Labor Day. I threw some camping gear in a car and a kayak on the roof and took off, exploring the Beaver State in its prime.
Seven years later, I’m an Airbnb Superhost, the owner of a custom-built camper van and a Subaru Outback that tows a teardrop trailer, all for rent on three different platforms, all boxing me into a velvet coffin of lifestyle that makes finding another full-time job hard to fathom.
California’s Alabama Hills has ample parking for vans, but the best spots tend to get snatched up quickly.Thanks to a tide of wildfire refugees and city slickers fleeing crowded metropolises in 2020, it was a banner year for my Airbnb listing. I plowed proceeds into a refurbished kitchen, bathroom, basement studio and bespoke backyard covered deck and sauna, crafted from comely western red cedar planks.
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