Category: Front Porch Musings

My friend, Carolyn, who I credit for some marvelous health improvements (see bioflavanoids in previous post this morning…) made the following comment about travel after having perused my recent travels on this blog:

“For me travelling is simply a way to get from A to B. I LOVE to go places but the getting there is not that fun.” 

The classic “Journey or Destination” paradox…  It really made me think – which I LOVE by the way!  And as a side note, if you want to read about some young women who are living – and I mean LIVING life and being thoughtful, world-caring, world-changing people – visit Carolyn’s blog and then her blogging friends (links from her site) – and their friends….  These are people that give me hope – they have committed to God, marriage, family, people in need, the environment – and they have committed in LOVE – not necessairly huge “in the news” things – but simple daily acts of thoughtfulness, random acts of kindness, “doing unto others as we would have done unto us” lives…  Sharp contrast to the “me-me-me-ness” that seems to make the news. 

 

So, back to topic… Before I had the motorhome, I would have said that the same was true for me – “the getting there is not that much fun.”  Somewhere/somewhen after much business travel and a few cross country car trips my travel philosophy changed a bit.  It was so gradual and sneaky that I didn’t consciously see it happening.  The last car trip in 2000 – Montana to Maine to Nova Scotia and back – that was the first conscious thought of RVing.  I spent 7 weeks “on the road” and except for one week in a Maine cottage, I was in a different hotel every night – with a dog and cat and their respective beds, food, dishes, litter box…plus my computer and my stuff.

 

There were many times that trip when I fantasized about being in a little rv… and that’s where I started – looking at camper vans – mini-motorhomes.  It wasn’t just the in and out of motel thing, it was also that I realized that I really LOVED “road” travel – wandering around the country on the highway, listening to local radio and at night, tv – talking to people – What’s important to people here vs there?  What’s life like in this place?  It was realizing that I loved the journey.

 

Fast forward to summer, 2005.  I had off and on looked at vans, travel trailers, truck campers, motorhomes – everything!  They each have their plusses and minuses and I dithered.  But in early summer ’05 a number of things happened – I had sold a house I loved and did not find another, a relationship ended, I had a 1-2 year work committment with a long-standing client, i.e. didn’t matter where I worked from – short story, I was “footloose and fancy free” and somewhat in need of a distraction… oh, and I turned 50…

 

In true mid-life crisis fashion, I went to an RV dealer and bought the Winnebago.  As it turned out, it was perfect for me and the boys (Karl and Bob).  At the time, buying the RV was a “means to an end” – a way to look around the country and see if there was somewhere else I’d rather live – while having the comforts of home and ability to take my pets easily.  I never expected to like the “rv lifestyle”…I thought – I’ll look around, decide where I want to live and then sell this thing and get back to “real life”. 

Ha!  Turns out that I love travelling in my “300 square foot 1 bedroom/1 bath home on wheels”.  The pets adapted beautifully and now I can’t envision traveling any other way and additionally the whole rv thing has become a hobby and the travel an addiction of sorts.  I haven’t really had a hobby before – it is incredible to me that I have become so enamored of all things RV and in the process, I hardly care WHERE I go, I just enjoy the going – with the paradox of loving Montana, my little house and the beautiful forest I live in.

 

So, maybe it is more than the RV journey – the journey of life and of discovering my place in it – on wheels or on ground.  Either way, now, for me, it is the journey.

This blog will really start on June 13, 2007 when I leave my home in Montana on a trip to visit my folks in Colorado.

In the opening pages of Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, there is a description of the wanderlust that is behind “going”:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck, and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayard man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He as a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdon, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

And also from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley :

I am in love with Montana – for other states I have respect, recognition, even some affection but with Montana it is love, and it is difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.

I do love Montana – my chosen home – and especially my own little corner of it. As it gets closer to the time I plan to leave, all of the things “here” become more dear and I have a faint wondering of “Why am I going?”. I look out the window at the newly thinned and healthy woods with the shadows of the mountains of the Swan Range in the background. I think about the mornings and evenings on my front porch with my dog and cat for company and them enjoying the freedom of this semi-wild place with no leashes – all of us going in and out as we please. I walk through my little house that glows with soft reflected light on warm wood and especially my cozy bedroom – knotty pine all around and fluffy down comforters and pillows – the always cool nights. But the plans are made and as the time to leave gets very close, there is no turning back, no second thoughts and suddenly it becomes impossible to think of not going – the trip has become an entity.