I consider it as I bike by the building site where the city is erecting an affordable housing complex just outside the park. It’s prime real estate. A quick walk or bike ride to my favorite place in Key West: Fort Zachary Taylor State Park and across from the amphitheater where they do live shows–the stage entertains your front while the sun sets and paints the sky at your back.

Fort Zach is where I live now in an RV, as a workamper, a thirty second stroll to the Gulf of Mexico. I can be here even after it closes–in the park after dark is a rare treat made magical by the glow of a full moon. Waves crashing on the shore is my bedtime story. While others wait in line and pay admission, I walk out my front door and can lay claim to my favorite table before the gates even open. It’s paradise within paradise. The catch is I can only stay for three or four months.

Every day I watch the crew spread gravel, plant trees, and install sewer lines. It’s in the early stages which has me thinking. . . not only affordable (it costs about $2,000 to live on this island in a modest apartment where you don’t have to share a kitchen or wait your turn on the toilet) but, speaking of toilets, a seat that no ones butt has been on but mine. No holes in the walls filled in with toothpaste from a previous tenant. No moldy smell leeching from a building battered by rain, storms, and hurricanes. No odor emanating from the carpet of a male cat marking his territory that you just can’t get out no matter how hard you try.

Then my memory slaps my mind, waking it up out of its reverie. Adventure is my drug. Staying put kills it for me. The thing that is the catch is also the cat’s meow about my lifestyle. I get to go. I get to explore. I get to discover new places and in the process, discover new things about myself. And others. Something happens when you live on the road–many things actually–but one of the best is that connection becomes your currency. You become dependent on finding the mercy that this world affords.

“Fortune favors the bold” the Roman poet Virgil said and his words spur me on.

But for a place to make me seriously consider hanging up my hitch, that says how much I love Key West.