Of Another Life – First 30 Pages

Please see below for an excerpt (the first 30 pages, give or take) of my book about our journey around the country in our travel trailer. If you know all about our adventure, please imagine you know nothing. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never heard of us, never seen us, and has only read the back of the book (which might go something like this): “In ‘Of Another Life: One Family’s Adventure Across America’ Nick Woodland, his wife, Wendy, and their three girls, sell their house and depart on an epic journey in an RV across the country. Along the way they encounter wild weather, sublime wilderness, relearn how to make oatmeal, and share one bathroom. They have their struggles and difficulties in the small space, but they also live energetically in the moment and discover the benefits of slowing down and seeing the beauty all around us. Together, they leave the past behind, the future where it is and, for a year, enjoy the present in all its underappreciated glory.”

Prologue – Taking the Plunge

I’M LIKE MOST DADS, I suppose, except that at forty-seven years of age my wife and I pulled our three kids out of school, sold our house and most of our belongings, quit our jobs, bought an RV, and left town for a year on the road with the family. 

“It’ll be a grand adventure,” we told our three daughters, aged eight, eleven and thirteen at the time. “We’ll see the country and develop an unbreakable bond! We’ll disconnect from technology! We’ll live simply and earnestly and be engaged in the present! The world will be our oyster and we’ll slurp the virulent juices from the shell like savages!” (ok, I didn’t tell them that last part.) 

“So what if we don’t know anything about RVing,” my wife told me. 

“What about health care?” I said. “Prescriptions? Mail?” 

“Who cares, we’ll figure it out,” she said. 

“Money?”

“Sure, we’ll have enough to spare!” Under her breath, she’d add, “If we can sell the house.”

“Weather? Vicious animals? Flat tires? Unsavory characters?”

What could possibly go wrong? I asked myself in reflective moments.

I’d like to say that I know myself. Really know myself. I think most of us would prefer to say the same. I suppose there are those among us who can say it and mean it and be right. But not me. I hem and haw. I start things that don’t work out. I quit things half way through. I don’t hate myself for that. I recognize that I was not endowed with ice-cold conviction and rock-hard resolve. My search for self has led me down many paths and delivered a rich life that I wouldn’t have today if I’d chosen one path and stuck to it (take that ice-cold conviction!) 

I loved Bailey, Colorado, our hometown. It’s true mountain living. The air is clean and pure, the sharp tang of balsam floating on the breeze. The night sky is dark enough that you can see the stars right there on the horizon. The roads are nasty in winter and driveways are notoriously perilous. The air is as dry as parchment paper in spring and, likewise, your skin. In summer, the grass turns a vivid, neon green. Fall is brilliant. The aspens turn gold, their foliage in stark contrast to the deep cobalt of the sky and the white that can dust the peaks that time of year. The forests, open and clear of understory, beg to be explored.

As a family we spent a lot of time outside. Blissful days of rafting, bikepacking, backpacking and camping. We disconnected from the unimportant stuff and reconnected with each other. We talked and told stories. We played games and laughed. We sat close on camp chairs and looked at each other over a crackling fire as we talked. We listened. And we did hard stuff. We pulled heavy oars through stubborn currents and held our breath as huge rocks slipped past in the rapids. We hauled heavy loads deep into canyon country and massaged sore feet under the cover of sandstone cliffs smooth as butter. We pushed fully loaded bikes up mountain trails in the dwindling light of a hard day. We spent every waking moment within arms reach.

It’s easy to take what you have for granted. Shameful how readily we do that in our lives. Wendy and I would tell ourselves not to do so. We knew what we had was special. We returned and fell back into our old ways, though. Only human, right? We forgot to enjoy what we had. Forgot to enjoy each other’s company and listen. We went back to the helter-skelter lives we live as full-time working parents. 

That’s why, when the glimmer of an idea began forming as to how we might reclaim those halcyon days on the river or on a mountain trail, we listened and waited and wondered.

What if?

In a way, the decision to leave everything behind was just another path along the landscape of my life. I figured if you can’t change your mind about something, if you can’t draw a line in the sand and stand behind it (come hell or high water, as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood might put it, men of unquestionably ice-cold conviction), then perhaps the only thing you can change is your place. 

“To change scenery…All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do.” This is how Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts puts it before he sets off on a similarly daunting, albeit entirely different sort of trek; his on foot across Europe, ours via a Chevy Tahoe and a thirty-four foot Coachmen Apex travel trailer across America. 

***

SO WE LOADED UP and hit the road. Of course, it wasn’t that easy.

People would like us to say definitively what it was that started the ball rolling. How did you hatch this crazy plan? they ask. I think the assumption was that a big decision such as the one we made must have started with a bang, or at least with a catalyst of some kind. People could wrap their heads around that. The disappointing truth was that it didn’t really start that way. Wendy and I point to different moments and to different ideologies around why we wanted to do it. She talked about carpe diem and wanting to do something hard, wanting to challenge herself and her kids. I talked about escaping the rat race, leaving the feverish hustle and bustle of busy family life behind, and about my love of adventure and exploration. To see the world. To live a little.

RVing around the country for a year was not a dream that we harbored for years and years, working in small, or big, ways to make it happen. The sacrifice we ended up making, however, would come to be sudden and drastic and would haunt us throughout the trip.

I had a friend who competed in IronMan triathlons. For his first attempt he told his wife that for the year leading up to it, in order to follow his intense training regimen, he wouldn’t be able to attend any events outside the norm: think weddings, birthday parties, dinner parties, luncheons, galas, whatever it may have been. (Thinking back on this now, it was either his idea of a sacrifice or an ingenious method of avoiding any awkward social gatherings.)

My point is, we didn’t really make the decision and then work for years to attain it. We just looked at each other, knew we had a good idea—maybe even a great one—knew the timing was right and went for it. An opportunity arose and we took it. I think the unflappable travel writer Paul Theroux had it right. In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, he says, “…sometimes you just have to clear out.” Also, I think Fermor would have liked the spontaneity. It wasn’t what we chose to do, it’s that we chose to do it at all.

***

BACK IN 2020, WHEN we bought our first whitewater raft and began embarking on family overnighters along the Colorado River, a friend asked Wendy and I whether we’d ever rafted before. 

“No, not really”, we said, looking at each other sheepishly, understanding that the question was rhetorical and essentially translated to: “You guys are crazy.”

In case you’re wondering, no, we’d never been RVing before either.

***

SOUTHEAST

January 10 – 13, 2024

Beignets in Mo’ Bay

THE DAY DAWNED CLEAR and cold in Mobile, Alabama; 41° in the morning, warming to 55° in the afternoon. Almost like fall where I come from. A perfect travel day. We should’ve been on the road. The storm the day before, the storm that had truly threatened our safety, had me rattled, though. My nerves were frayed. I wasn’t ready to drive just yet. Extending our stay a few more days was acceptable. I just hoped I’d left enough time to arrive in Houston by the 16th for our friend’s memorial.

***

MOBILE IS A SLEEPY KIND of place, at least mid-day on a Wednesday in early January. We walked down Dauphin Street and admired the wrought-iron balconies that we’d come to love in Savannah. Trendy boutiques captured Ava’s eyes. The Loda Bier Garten was covered in beer kegs sticking out every which way like peculiar antennae. Bead necklaces littered the ground, proof of past, and future—Mardi Gras was right around the corner—debauchery. For lunch, I had a pistolette, a slender deep fried pocket filled with creamed shrimp. A delectable mess.

A chilling wind accompanied our walk to the GulfQuest museum. Wendy and I weren’t sure the kids were going to love this one. It turned out to be a surprising gem. Interactive displays included a knot tying station, a choose-your-own-boating-style game, models of sailboats and a fan to help you learn the intricacies of wind-driven propulsion, a navigation station with real sextants and chronometers to hold. A high-tech simulator was housed at the topmost level. From the controls you could attempt to navigate a giant container ship through Mobile Bay. The girls all had a go at this and Teagan, 8-years-old and our youngest, was the most successful. All this was housed, most appropriately, in a simulacrum of an actual container ship, the McLean out of Mobile.

Back in town, we studied the only replica made of Queen Isabella’s crown and scepter at the Spanish Plaza Park. Isabella was a savvy leader who survived four years of civil war at the start of her reign in 1474. She prevailed over her opponents and affected the creation of an outwardly united Spain. I wonder whether she ever explored the area around Mobile. Her counterparts were certainly in the area and she visited Santa Fe during her reign. It was there that she pledged her staunch support for a then little-known explorer, and his desire to outfit a voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus. 

The girls stood in front of the friendship arches in the park. We took a picture of them looking like friends, happy, goofy and smiling. Sienna, our oldest, has red converse on and billowing light blue parachute pants. Her long blond hair spills down to her upper back. Ava has her blond hair up in a hasty bun and is wearing the green Savannah sweatshirt her aunt bought for her. Teagan’s shoulder-length hair is under a bright red Jordan flat bill hat. Her arms are up over her sister’s heads.

After six months on the road, however, we knew the “friendship” was being tested as never before.

***

WE MADE A MESS of ourselves at Mo’ Bay Beignets, powdered sugar more evident on us than on the beignets. A better reason for a mess (not even the pistolette) would be hard to find. After a long brisk walk across town, those beatific pockets of soft dough, encased in a slightly crunchy exterior, generously coated in brilliant white sugar, were to die for. 

On the way home, we drove through the tunnel on I-10 under the Mobile River. From the causeway across Mobile Bay we saw the sun setting behind the mighty USS Alabama, a WWII-era battleship that we’d explored extensively a few days prior.

Returning to camp, we saw our friends Mike and Ally and their son Croix (rhymes with boy). We met them months ago in Georgia. Mike told me he was preparing to winterize his rig.

“You’re doing what?” I said.

“Supposed to drop to 19° in the next few days.”

“For real,” I said, groaning. After the trauma of the last storm, I was unprepared for the next weather event.

Mike said, “I’m gonna put some antifreeze in my tanks, not sure about the water lines yet, though.”

I wasn’t prepared to think about winterizing. In fact, I was so ignorant of winter weather along the Gulf that I hadn’t even researched how to winterize my rig. Had no idea. It’s supposed to be warm in the south in the winter, right?! 

In my ignorance I’d assumed, given our route and our timing, that we’d spend a whole year between 60° and 80°. Turns out, I didn’t know a damn thing about the violence and intensity of winter weather in the region.

***

WE’D HAD TOO MUCH inclement weather over the winter. Driving the rig was becoming increasingly more taxing on me. I tried not to let on about how nervous it made me to pile everyone in and head back out onto the Great American Highway.

Our rig consisted of this: fifty-two feet and fifteen thousand pounds of steel and aluminum and composite paneling. We lived in a Coachmen Apex 300BHS Ultralight travel trailer: thirty-four feet, three inches long and eight feet wide with a tandem-axle chassis. We pulled it with a 6.2 liter, 8-cylinder, 420 hp High Country Chevy Tahoe (which, as we discovered earlier in our trip, would be a controversial choice as a tow vehicle for many in the RV world). For sway control and weight distribution, I used a B&W Continuum hitch. The front portion of our trailer was the parent’s room featuring a queen bed, the rear bunkhouse had three bunks for the girls and the middle portion was the kitchen, bathroom, dining and living room. Inside height was six feet, six inches. It had two slides, one in the kitchen and one in the bunk. With slides extended it boasted just around three hundred square feet.

Driving wasn’t terribly difficult, depending on conditions. After about a month, I’d gotten used to the whims of weather and roads and drivers. Passing semis would always make the trailer sway slightly. Strong gusts of wind (30 mph for my setup) would do the same. I had learned to hold the wheel loosely and to accommodate the trailer. 

Busy arteries made me nervous. Who’s going to pull out in front of me? I’d ask, scanning the road constantly. That guy in the box truck who is probably late for a delivery? That woman in the Escalade doing her makeup, phone squished between her shoulder and ear? That carpenter in the pickup truck, a bunch of junk in the bed. I’m sure the reflection on the windshield from all the garbage on his dashboard is impacting his view. That dude in the white van with sixteen ladders on the roof? The guy on the dirt bike ready to exit that gas station, revving the throttle, bouncing up and down, impatience radiating from his every pore. You never knew, and that uncertainty more than the mileage or the weather or the wind or the big rigs was what wore me down.

And ultimately led us here, to Alabama. We’d left Colorado on June 14th of the previous year. Summer found us crossing the Great American Prairie into Illinois and eventually New England. Then, we worked our way south into the Carolinas for fall. Winter found us in Florida and for a while the weather was great. Classic off-season Florida; beaches to ourselves and still warm enough to enjoy the sun and the sand and the surf. Then things had turned down around Miami. Rain moved in for days at a time. Leaks sprang in the camper. The humidity made everything damp. Sleeping was difficult, even with air conditioning. The rain continued. Then storms, heavy winds and lashing rain found us. A bad one near Naples threatened to push me right off the side of I-75. I contemplated stopping, but pushed through and got away with one by the skin of my teeth. More storms caught us in the St. Petersburg area; Wendy and I drove over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in terror. For Florida, it was cold. We had lows in the thirties. The storms continued around the panhandle into Alabama and then the big one hit us in Mobile. 

Therefore, my fear that something terrible could happen to us was increasing. I felt vulnerable on the roads. I balked when I saw worsening weather in the forecast and would extend one campground stay (and subsequently shorten the next) to accommodate the weather.

***

MEAHER STATE PARK IS a splendid strip of coastal lowlands in the middle of Mobile Bay, or Mo’ Bay. The sunsets from the pier, while the mullet jump clear out of the ocean for, as I prefer to think, sheer joy, are sublime. Our site was tucked up among some tall loblolly pine trees.

On our last day, the girls and their friend Croix played a game in which they basically threw giant loblolly pine cones at each other. They’d stash piles of them behind trees or next to buildings and wait for each other to come near. They literally came back bloody from this game. I liked to call it Punjabi, because it reminded me of old college buddies who used to throw sticks at each other in the woods. They’d yell “PUNJABI!” (maybe one of them was big into language arts) before throwing the stick. This, presumably, to give you time to get the hell out of the way. 

We had a showdown with one of our girls over schoolwork that morning. She refused to complete her work. As parents these are the moments when you know you need to put your foot down, but teenage girls are awfully good at prying them up. Wendy and I waited her out (we made a determined, united-front effort to do so). To her credit, she turned the tables and resumed her work.

Early in our trip we had a good regimen going for schoolwork. Every day the girls had to do a math lesson on Teaching Textbooks, an online math curriculum. They had passages to read and responses to write on questions about those passages. They worked on presentations in Google Slides about various things we discovered during our travels. Finally, they had to read their books for thirty minutes and write in their journals for thirty minutes.

If you think we managed to keep up that regimen of homeschooling for the whole trip then I applaud your gullibility. Homeschooling is hard!

It’s easy to pick out the homeschoolers in the campgrounds: big families or families with girls in braids, or both. Playing foursquare in a homemade chalk court is another giveaway. Kids walking around with bags collecting things? Boom, homeschoolers!

Homeschoolers come in many varieties; those that have always done it and have never put their kids in school; those who have pulled their kids out of school and never plan to put them back in, or those, like us, who do it temporarily, knowing the kids will be back in school eventually. Then there’s the unschoolers, road schoolers and world schoolers.

Re-entering the school systems confidently was something we wanted for our girls. On one hand we wanted to keep them strong in all areas of their academics. On the other hand, we (ok, I) wanted to say, “it’s only a year, we’ll have lots of field trips, they’ll be fine.”

But academics aside, the real challenge of homeschooling is acting as your children’s parent and teacher. Those are very different roles and doing both is a delicate balancing act and this is where talented and dedicated homeschooling parents undoubtedly deserve our respect.

Thanks to COVID-19, we now all have some sense of what it means to homeschool our children. We now know how reluctant our kids can be to learn, to work, to show any kind of self-motivation or work ethic or frankly any desire to do anything we say. We’d look at our spouse in exasperation and say later, “I had no idea it was this hard.”

That night, after the homeschooling battle, we had the usual brush-your-teeth battle, the get-in-bed battle, the turn-off-your-light battle and, finally, the quiet-down battle. Battles, battles, battles. Kids!

Acadiana and a Bowl of Oatmeal

WE DROVE THROUGH MISSISSIPPI faster than Muddy Waters could sing “Hoochie Coochie Man.” It didn’t matter to us, we knew we’d be putting two stickers on the vinyl map on the back of our RV that day. Mississippi and Louisiana; numbers twenty-four and twenty-five.

For all my anxiety about driving, the ride from Meaher to a small city campground outside Lafayette called Acadiana, was smooth. I-10 the whole way. Just ballin’ the jack and dropping the hammer, pedal to the medal, good buddy. Sometimes, living my life on the highways and byways of America inspired me to slip into my old CB radio days. My gold 1985 Volvo 240 had one. I could call my high school friends on it and we’d meet up and cause trouble. We even had handles: the Red Baron, the Golden Revolver, and the Mothership.

At a Pilot Flying J off the Interstate today Teagan bought herself a new pair of headphones. Next to the display was a rack of delicate glass flowers. We both looked at each other as if to say, who buys those? Truckers, presumably.

Acadiana Park in Lafayette was a rustic, tucked away campground. The employee on the phone simply gave us the gate code and told us to pick a site. We drove through slowly. The roads had nasty drop-offs that could’ve rolled a camper. I focused on the turns. Settling on a spot, Wendy helped me back in the rig. Once the camper was parked and leveled, I killed the Tahoe’s engine. That part always felt good. The finality of it. Another day was done and everyone was safe and secure.

We set up camp with the ease and efficiency that we attained after six months on the road. First, we use our leveling blocks. Wendy tucks them under the trailer wheels on the low side and I back up onto them until she says stop. Then she pounds some wheel chocks under and we start unhooking. While she activates the power jack to raise the coupler, I release the air pressure from our weight distribution hitch and unhook it from the pin block. I unhook the safety chains and the seven pin connector. By now the coupler is high enough and it disengages from the hitch ball with a thud and a visible shudder from the Tahoe, as if it’s happy to shake free. I pull the Tahoe away from the trailer and park it. Then, it’s on to the stabilizers. The jackhammer racket of someone extending their scissor jacks with an impact driver will always remind me of life on the road. The girls help extend the slides and awning, open the windows, set the bins of veggies and dish towels back on the counter, and remove the electric kettle and toaster from the bathtub. (Yes, you heard that right, we taught the kids to keep the electric kettle and toaster in the bathtub. I hope that doesn’t backfire some day.) They also turn on the water pump (but never with city water) and the water heater. If we have power we can switch the fridge back to electric to save on propane. RV Rule of the Road: Use a checklist when it’s time to hook/pack everything back up.

While they’re busy inside, I’m at the outdoor kitchen setting up our roll top table, the Camp Chef stove and our folding camp chairs. If we’re staying for a few days I’ll roll out the outdoor mat, put the vinyl tablecloth on the picnic table and bring down the bikes; two on the tongue mounted rack, two on the roof of the Tahoe and one inside the camper, held snugly by a bungee and a heavy duty hook screwed into the floor by my bed.

***

AFTER CAMP WAS SET up we took a walk. Acadiana has a nature center, built in harmony with the thick forest. We perused the dried pelts of opossum and flying squirrel; the papery snakeskins from copperheads and cottonmouth moccasins. Huge leatherback turtle shells leaned against the plank walls. A sawed off timber showed the work of carpenter bees in the cross section of the wood. An exhaustive list of local birds was available as a checklist. The Swainson’s Warbler was the most sought after bird in the area. Covering half of one wall was a gorgeous geologic map of Louisiana from 1984. If you can’t wrap your head around the information displayed on such a map, the colors alone are enough to grab your eye. What caught mine was the clear delineation of the Mississippi floodplain deposits making a green swoosh across the central and eastern portion of the state.

The girls had really grown to appreciate places like this and they enjoyed what the nature center had to offer. They felt bad for the animals that had died to provide the displays for the center.

“They were probably already dead,” I offered.

“Yeah, it’s still sad, Dad. Geez.”

***

JOURNAL ENTRY: JANUARY 13, 2024, ACADIANA PARK CAMPGROUND

“Ava, writing in her journal, asked from bed: ‘We’re in Mississippi, right?’ ‘No, sweetie, we’re in Louisiana.’ ‘Oh, ok.’ Typical exchange between us lately. No one is really sure where we are at any given moment.”

***

I TRIED TO MAKE Oatmeal one morning. Here’s how it went. First, I had to clean the sand off my feet to climb up onto the dinette couch in order to reach the food pantry above the table. We are all too short to reach up there. I removed all the bread products, including the moldy french bread, and retrieved the oatmeal. It almost slipped from my hands as the stupid, flimsy lid popped out. Then, I put all the bread products back, including the moldy french bread, and pour…dang it, the fresh water is in the outdoor kitchen. I put my shoes back on and went outside, opened the trap door to the outdoor kitchen, grabbed the jug of water and went back inside. I remove the small pot from the upper cabinet. I have to take the lid off the big one first, pull the small pot out, then put the large lid back on. Finally, I have water heating up. Now I need all the fixins. Back to the pantry, shoes off, climb up, remove all the bread, get the walnuts and Craisans and put the bread back in. Then, I added the oatmeal and cooked it for five using the broken microwave’s timer (all it’s good for now; that and storage). Shoot, I forgot the brown sugar! Yes, it’s behind all the bread products and also the peanut butter and bouillon cubes and lipton noodle soup. Ok, I finally have all the gosh darn ingredients together. It’s finished cooking. I need the cinnamon. That’s kept in a small bin in a different cabinet. I pulled that out and all the cups and other stuff fell into the space it occupied. When I put it back after using the cinnamon, I had to re-create its niche. After all that fussing around, I’m not eating a culinary masterpiece; instead, just a regular old bowl of overcooked mushy oatmeal. 

I won’t go into the time I sprinkled cumin on my oatmeal thinking it was cinnamon.

***

ONE AFTERNOON THE GIRLS did a map exercise. I had them draw maps of our campsite (large-scale) and then one of the campground loops (small-scale) including site numbers and locations for the bathrooms, dumpsters and water spigots. I then followed their maps and made some edits. Couched in map work, this was primarily an exercise in team work. Who gets to hold the paper and make the notations? Who decides which way to go? How would they solve any disagreements? Could they work together? When they’re around their parents it’s a constant competition for our attention. Out on their own, however, they have an established hierarchy among themselves. These activities generally start poorly as they want to show us what they can do. Someone usually gets upset. When they return, though, they are proud and in good spirits. 

There’s a lesson here. Kids generally don’t accept their parents’ suggestions. Let’s go hiking! Let’s go bike riding! Let’s go to a museum! Let’s do a scavenger hunt! (maybe those just aren’t great suggestions, Dad). It’s the timeless quandary for parents. Why do kids make it difficult to step out the door to embark on activities they eventually enjoy doing?

Alastair Humphreys, a British author, adventurer I’ve followed over the years, wrote a book called The Doorstep Mile. Humphreys was an adventurer in the old style, undertaking epic adventures around the globe: walking across the Empty Quarter, bicycling around the world and rowing the Atlantic, for starters. Excursions to be respected. His inspiration came from people such as Wilfred Thesinger and Sir Ranulph Fiennes, British explorers in the grand tradition. 

Realizing he couldn’t continue to tramp around the world and be a good father and husband, he dreamed up an idea called Microadventures. These are adventures that we can wrap our heads around. They are right around the corner. They can be undertaken in a day or even less. The simple idea is to use the time we have available to us and stop dreaming (while our lives carry on around us) about the big one that might come only once in a lifetime…if we’re lucky.

I readily took to this idea. My microadventures took the form of overnight bikepacking trips or overnight missions to climb 14ers in Colorado’s high country. I couldn’t believe how one night out under the stars could be so exhilarating. In some cases, I spent just fourteen hours away from home: leaving town after work, climbing to a summit by sundown, sleeping on top, and returning early in the morning for breakfast. They were profound experiences.

In his book, he talks about the difficulty of taking that first step on any undertaking. It doesn’t have to be an epic expedition or even an overnight backpacking trip. It can be any endeavor: starting a business, jumping in an ice cold river, making a long overdue phone call, joining a club, speaking in public. The first step out the door to a more adventurous life is always the most difficult and the one most likely to hamper us. We took a huge step out our door when we decided to sell everything and leave. But sometimes even the smallest of steps is hard. I try to think about that huge step when I’m confronted by a small one I don’t want to take.

RETROSPECTIVE: Parenthood

PEOPLE OFTEN SAY THAT having a dog is a good trial run before having children. I suppose it makes a certain kind of sense. You are suddenly overwhelmed by this unruly presence in your personal and private space. You don’t know how to communicate to start. You have reams of advice and how-to’s and do’s-and-dont’s and books on the topic, yet you still feel absurdly ill-prepared. They shit all over the place. They throw up all over the place. They are needy. They can infuriate you or overwhelm you with love.

Yes, I guess it does make sense.

***

IT WAS IN COLORADO that we started our family.

Sienna came in 2009 in a hurry, which is funny because we are always waiting on her nowadays. I drove Wendy to the hospital in our old Ford Escape and she was shouting obscenities like a drunk Scotsman and I was trying to say things to soothe her. They all fell short. I eventually shut up and drove. Being our first, Sienna was an adventure into the unknown.

There were so many firsts! First car seat, first doctor’s visit, first restaurant, first family visit, first blowout. This tiny little human constantly amazed us, while also upending everything we had ever known.

She had a crazy head of hair, her signature, right out of the gate. People would meet her and instantly exclaim in delighted surprise at her thick head of lustrous brown hair. She had a wonderful bubbly personality and would dip her head in close as if she was going to divulge a deep secret in order to tell you that she was going to do “just one more jump on the trampoline”, or go “even faster” in her pink Fisher Price car. She loved playing with babies and stuffies. She would set up get-togethers with all her “friends.”

She picked up bike riding and reading early in life. Sleep never came easy. Sit down next to her with a book, though, and she’d read it all the way through.

***

AVA CAME IN 2011 and we had a little more wiggle room this time. Wendy was induced. We drove leisurely down to the hospital for her appointment. I remember thinking this was different. I thought all babies came in a mad rush. Didn’t you have to drive like a bat out of hell while your wife screamed obscenities next to you? No, apparently you didn’t. This was nice.

Ava’s head, unlike Sienna’s, was covered in soft, peach-fuzz hair. You could barely see it. It felt so good to run your hand over her head. She had the best smile.

She was full of life and goofy and funny and highly entertaining. Ava could make her big sister laugh harder than anyone. Her hair finally did come in, blond and spiky. She would scrunch her face up and bunch her shoulders in a funny expression. She was a thinker. You could see her looking at something and know that she’d look to you for a further explanation of how it worked. She loved all things tiny, like Calico Critters. And she was so sweet. She was Mommy’s best snuggler.

She also had a stubborn streak and could dig her heels in deep. Although Ava was an easy sleeper, she could put serious sassy sauce on anything she dished out. 

***

TEAGAN CAME IN 2015 and by then we were old hands. Since she came quickly we hadn’t yet decided on her name. Her miniscule wristband from the hospital—now folded flat in a manilla envelope, along with her tiny foot stamp—says, “Baby Woodland.”

She loved playing with her sisters. She loved Elmo. Once, we lost her Elmo stuffie and we all felt the loss acutely. Thankfully, Elmo turned up again.

Her love of Elmo demonstrated a deeper loyalty that she had to her family and friends. She had a maturity in that regard that came out early. People gravitated to her because of it. She was our only child who had stuffies and blankets of lasting interest. She was devoted and compassionate. She had a deep reservoir of empathy from a young age. 

She was a great project helper. Anything that needed drills or hammers. I could give her a job and she would settle right in. We had a kid-sized wheelbarrow that she loved to fill with rocks and drive around. She liked PJ Masks and Paw Patrol and fire trucks and matchbox cars. At only a few years of age she began to choose clothes from the boy’s section. No princesses and fairy tales and pink and frilly stuff for her. If it had a dinosaur on it, or a truck or a moose…or Elmo, then she was sold.

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SOUTHWEST

January 14 – March 29, 2024

Musty, Crusty and Dusty

I WAS SORRY TO leave the peaceful setting of Acadiana and its hidden nature center. The girls, however, were excited to see friends and family in Houston, San Antonio and Austin. 

I expected better from Texas highways. I-10 turned to something resembling a strafed enemy airfield as soon as we left Louisiana. “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead, our official theme song thanks to Sienna, played on Spotify. That helped the miles pass a little quicker.

The trailer felt good as we arrived in Houston. Occasionally, I shifted items around to distribute the load more evenly to ensure the trailer was as stable as possible. I didn’t want to overload the Tahoe which was already carrying the five of us, two bikes, two inflatable paddleboards and the tongue weight of the trailer, which could be significant if not properly packed. If the tanks on the trailer were empty, I could compensate by moving the paddleboards into the bunkhouse for a travel day. I tried to always have at least a third of a tank of freshwater in case we broke down or had an unexpected stop for the night.

***

THE TALK OF THE town at the Jetstream NASA RV park (decidedly not a campground) was the incoming polar vortex. While the girls explored the swanky grounds of the park, which included a frequent flyer-esque clubhouse, a common kitchen, a TV room, a pool, an outdoor grilling area and dog park, free WIFI, laundry facilities, and a propane tank filling station, I prepared to winterize the rig.

We’d purchased a case of pink antifreeze at a local RV dealer on the way. I poured those down the sinks and drains which lead to the gray water tank, and into the toilet which leads to the black tank. This, hopefully, would keep anything in those tanks from freezing solid overnight. I filled up our freshwater tank so it wouldn’t freeze, too. 

We have a heated underbelly in our Apex, which means that some of the heat from the furnace is directed down into the area that houses the tanks. I disconnected our fresh water hoses from outside and stored them in the bathtub (yes, that’s right, next to the toaster). I took out the bottom drawer in the bunkhouse (Teagan’s toy drawer) to expose the water pump to more heat. I removed a similar panel from the bathtub and the cabinet doors under the kitchen sink for the same reason. In the outdoor kitchen I put foam pipe insulation on the exposed water lines leading from the sink into the water pump and bathroom. Finally, I put a wool sock over the freshwater tank drain plug.

I stood back to admire my work and felt the mercury beginning to drop.

I had never planned to winterize our rig during the trip. The thought just hadn’t crossed my mind. I didn’t realize how cold the Gulf states could be during winter, and I certainly didn’t think we’d experience a polar vortex.

Technically speaking, the portion of the upper atmosphere that spins around the North Pole is known as the polar vortex. It’s always there, as the jet stream is, only at a higher altitude and thus, more stable. Only the biggest and strongest of atmospheric disturbances will rise high enough to affect it. This is why polar vortex events are media worthy. That, and the fact that they wreak havoc in places that aren’t equipped for deep freezes.

When a strong enough disturbance affects the polar vortex, it splits into two areas of spinning air that fall out over Europe, Asia and North America. Like two billiard balls sent spinning by a cue ball. The cue ball, now sitting over the arctic, opens the area to high pressure. While North America is plunged into a deep freeze, the arctic warms dramatically. The polar vortex itself never makes it as far south as Texas, but enough cold air is funneled down to drop temperatures to record levels. Forecasts were calling for temperatures in the low twenties with breezy conditions. I was nervous something would freeze and crack. Never having experienced sub-zero conditions in an RV before, I was being overly anal about my preparations. I was also being overly lamentable. What were the chances that, for the three days we spent in Houston, we’d arrive during a polar vortex event. For real! I kept saying. Come on!

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If you made it this far, thanks for reading. There is more to come. Please leave me any comments on your thoughts to the tone, voice, structure, setting, description, dialogue, grammar, word choice, flow. Anything at all!