The start of a new project

Sometimes an idea occurs to you and it seems so right that you have to just go ahead and make it a reality.  So today I handed in my notice at the consulting company I have been working for the past six years.
In four weeks time I will be free from this company, and it sure is a relief to have done this.  The company itself is very good to work for, but the nature of this job means I cannot really plan anything in my life.  Yes the job is nomadic, and this is what I want - a nomadic existence.  However I want firstly, to be in control of where I will be working at a date x in the future.  Secondly, I want to slow the velocity of the nomadic lifestyle.  So I want to maybe stay in an area for a few months, then move on.  Thirdly I want to stop working with computers, in the long run and run my own business in something I enjoy.

So I have been following this blog

http://ourlifeinacaravan.blogspot.com/

This blog, as the name suggests is about how it is to live in a caravan.  I do not necessarily want to live in a caravan but I sure do like spending time at camp sites.  The blog's author also expounds upon how he has changed his career and you can really see how living this new life has been very beneficial.  Even the rigours of living through an arctic winter in a caravan have not phased this author at all - on the contrary he appears to have enjoyed this challenge a good deal.

Now one thing I really like to do is work with my hands.  At the school I attended we were encouraged to go as far as possible in education so you didn't have to work with your hands.  Unless you wanted to be a dentist I guess, where you do the education to work with your hands.  Anyway, I had a knack with computers so this is what I ended up doing, although at university I actually studied Philosophy.

The above mentioned blog went into some detail about the technical issues experienced in the caravan world so I started to think that maybe it would be fun to work as a caravan engineer.  But how do you become a caravan engineer and how do you get experience doing this sort of work?  At first I thought that maybe I could just do any sort of work on a caravan site and hope to get technical experience while doing warden work or cleaning work on sites during the busy summer season.  The problem with this approach though, is that it would not pay enough.

In my profession quite often companies will employ IT contractors for three to six months at a time.  So then the penny dropped and it all fell into place.  Why not work as an IT contractor?  Work at an area for three months on the good money a contractor earns, but instead of staying in a hotel as most contractors would do if working a long way from home, why not stay in a caravan park in my van for the duration of the contract?  You can only stay 28 days at a camp site so I would have to move maybe two or three times during the contract's duration.  And why not do a short caravan engineering course before starting the contracting?  And why not, while at the caravan site, put a sign on my van stating that I am a trained caravan engineer and can offer fairly competitive caravan servicing and repairs?  And why not just make sure I do a really good job whenever someone asks me to service or repair their caravan so that a reputation begins to build?  And then why not, over a period of time, spend more time doing the caravan engineering work instead of the IT engineering work?  Why not be my own man and run my own business doing something I enjoy?

Seems like a plan to me.