Keepin' it legal

Over the past eleven years the Rolling Steel Tent has been registered in North Carolina, South Dakota, Arizona and, currently, New Mexico. Each has been relatively easy but with a hoop or two to jump through — mostly because of unconventional life choices on my part. The trick for full-time nomads is providing proof of residency, yet I’ve found ways to do it.

I really need to wash the van

Well, my New Mexico registration expires next month. Ever since Lou’s place sold this past December, leaving me without a convenient domicile or New Mexico mailing address, I’ve been figuring how to handle renewal. Here’s what I came up with.

Step 1: See if the very friendly and helpful neighbors would let me use their address. They easily agreed.

Step 2: Go online to change my address with New Mexico Motor Vehicles Division. Done. Change it with my insurance company. Done.

Step 3: Try to renew registration online. Learned I needed a code number that would be on the renewal notice which would be mailed sometime in July — hopefully to the new address.

Step 4: Notify friends to be on the lookout for the renewal notice. Learned they were in Idaho dealing with an ailing mother. Wished them the best regarding that, and (to myself) hoped they’d return in time. Because I didn’t want to go all the way back to New Mexico to renew in person, which would require proof of residing at the new address.

Step 5: Wait

Step 6: Learn the friendly neighbors’ mother’s issues are under control and they are back home. Receive text with a photo of the renewal notice and its code number. Yay!

Step 7: Fill out online renewal (for two years this time). Encounter new worry. Since I was paying the renewal with my card, they wanted my billing address, which is at my Arizona mail forwarder, not at my neighbors. But the NMMVD program automatically copied it to the space for my mailing address, and I couldn’t figure out how to change it. I hoped that since the renewal notice and its code number had gone to my new mailing address then so would the new registration certificate and sticker.

Step 8: Wait. And hope.

Step 9: Receive text from friendly neighbors with the news the new registration stuff had arrived. Where should they send it? I gave them the general delivery address for where I am at the moment.

Step 10: Wait. 

I don’t know how long it’ll take for my registration to chug through the Postal Service. It could be here Friday or it might not be until the middle of next week. So I won’t be wandering too far from here. In the meantime I can make day trips into Olympic National Park, go out to the farthest northwest corner of the Lower 48, and poke around various coastal towns. And wait. At least I won’t need to worry about it again for two years (I wish they would do five, like Arizona). And my driver’s license is good until 2026. Who knows, by then I might be trying to register in, oh, Arkansas or something. The future is unknown.