brought up to date with what I've done lately

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-Sustainable vs regenerative: sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.
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-Living in the bus was always about far more than traveling. It would not be inaccurate to say that traveling was really a byproduct of living in the bus rather than the reason for it. A nice fringe benefit if you will. 
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-For me living in the bus was more about stepping outside, literally and figuratively. Stepping back as well, taking stock and critically evaluating the assumptions that had been handed to me about how to live. This very quickly became about living with less. When you have less than 160 square feet of livable space, everything becomes about doing more with less.
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-And that's what we wanted anyway, which is why the bus was always perfect. I wanted to step back and eliminate a lot of things and see if they actually mattered to me. It is one thing to sit around and wish you could get rid of things because they cost money or you think you might be able to get along without them.
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-It's another story entirely to actually do it. 
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-Living in the bus provided a way to experiment in doing without, but offset any loss with the adventure and excitement of travel and living on the road. You might miss your friends and family for instance, but you know, it's also nice to be sitting here on this perfect white sand beach in the Gulf of Mexico. Or you can think, gosh I'd really love the have some ice in this drink, but at least I'm sitting here in the amazing smelling pine forest 8000 feet up in the mountains of Colorado.
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-It's harder to notice loss when you're surrounded by beauty and when you can't wait to get to the next place. And you know you can't get to the next place, you can't have that feeling of freedom and peace without having given up that stuff. So your mindset shifts over time, the things that you were "giving up" become the very things that enable you to live, to get to that beauty and find that peace. In end there's no giving up, you're enabling.
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-I could see the beginnings of this before we left. I could read it in between the lines of some of the travelers I have long followed. Like Rolf Potts, Bumfuzzle, tk, but you can't really know it until you go a live it. And it grows. The further you go, the more any sense of loss fades and the sense of gain grows. The less becomes the more quite quickly actually. By the time we went made it to Fort Pickens the first time, about a month into a our trip, I don't think we were missing a thing. And we didn't even have a water tank or working shower yet.
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-To even get on the road in the first place we had to get rid of a ton of stuff, yes, but I think it was much more important to step back, to, as I said above, think critically about the assumptions your culture has handed you. To question those assumptions. There's a saying I like that I think embodies this quite well, and is apt since we had our share of rodent troubles over the years: you don't have a mouse problem, you have a cat shortage.
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-We questioned everything, trying to look at it sideways and see if there was another way to solve the problems. In doing so we learned all kids of things. Do we need a large living space? No. Provided we have a large outdoor space we don't really need anymore than place to sleep and get out of the weather from time to time. Did we really need tk? Nope. Do we really need air conditioning? No, but it can be really nice at times. How about Refridgeration? Nope, but again, nice for some things. The list here is very long, but you get the idea. 
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-It took a bit longer to extract some of the lessons from the micro-case studies, but I think there are two very important things I've taken away from this experience so far. The first that is that you should learned to adapt to the environment rather than changing the environment to suit you. You can take this as a macro level thing, for example, don't turn on the air conditioning the first time you get hot. Let your body adapt to the heat. You body is a phenomenal thing, it is capable of miraculous things if you give it the chance. But I also mean this at the micro level, don't change the environment around you by adding an extra fork, wash the one you have. And so on.
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-The second lesson I learned is that things don't have to be perfect. My natural tendency seems to be seeking some level of perfection, letting go of that is hard, still, but I have seen over and over again the virtue in doing it. From the desire to have the bus looking perfect to even this site, writing the perfect thing that's going to perfectly convey what I want to say. There's nothing wrong with striving for those things, until they get in the way of noticing where you are right now. There were so many days out there in the wilds of America where I was finally able to force myself to stop. To go get in the river with the kids, to go watch the birds at dawn, to sit around the fire half the night. To spend time where I was, rather than spending time worrying about how I could improve the future. 
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-The strange thing about the future is it never quite arrives, which is part of what makes it so enticing. We can store all our dreams and aspirations there and we don't have to let go of them. We can just put them out there and look at them from afar and never actually do anything today that moves you any closer to them. For whatever reason, somewhere in the last three years I got better at moving myself toward those things in the future by recognizing where I was, spending some time where I was and then looking at that future and seeing if actually wanted to go there. Nine times out of ten I realized I didn't. I relized the point wasn't to have the perfect cool bus to put on the internet, the point was to get in the river with the kids, to sit in the hammock, to dance on the couch, to cry under the engine. The future never arrives, today never leaves. If you try too hard to capture this in words you end up sounding like a fortune cookie. There are some things you can't write, you have to live them.
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-I saw, and still see, that as the first step in a transition away from a life consuming. Okay, so we consume much less, that's good. That's a first step, but we can (and should) go much farther than that.
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-Another ancillary benefit (goal?) of traveling in the bus was getting to see all the various regions of the country. Well, we did not get to all of them, but we got to quite a few. We missed the PAcific Northwest, but wet and cloudy is no place for me. I already know that (I am saving the Pacific Northwest for a different adventure many many years down the road). There were unexpected things in exploring the United States. I would never have predicted that we'd enjoy the great lakes, parciularly the regio around lakes Superior and Michigan so much. You could probably argue we didn't experience winter and therefore have a very distorted view of the great lakes, but to me that's just not a factor. I spent three long winters in New England, I know what winter is like and I am fine with it.
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-That said,