As it turns out, 3 months is a long time. 3 months of vanlife travel is perhaps a teeny-tiny-bit too long to be away from home, from friends, from a routine. Perhaps.
I did not begin to feel a strong longing to be home until ~ week 10 of our trip. It was an intermittent longing, juxtaposed with the joy and awe I felt every single day as we hiked and biked in so many stunning natural landscapes or watched summer storms pass through or awakened early for the sunrise or as I whipped up yet another scrumptious dinner … it may sound implausible, but every single day of this journey has brought beauty, adventure, and wonder. In spite of all of this travel goodness, these past 12 days in particular have found me feeling eager to be home, mostly to see friends that I miss dearly, but also to get my hands in the soil of my yard once again.
As I write today, we are at 8500 miles of travel for this trip and have been in 38 different campgrounds with 6 more campgrounds yet to visit. We have seen very few biting bugs, which is a miracle. We’ve seen a lot of birds, some of which have been lifers for us. We’ve hiked and biked many miles. Three big storms came through, yet we just missed the flooding that occurred in Guadalupe State Park (Texas), Zion, Bryce, and Goblin Valley (Utah) — what good fortune. We visited family and friends in both Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, and in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and our beloved old home town of Grass Valley, California. We were able to do nearly everything we wanted to do, except the MOMA in San Fran because it was closed, as was the Conservatory of Flowers there, and two hikes were skipped due to no parking available at the trailhead. We saw moose in Colorado, but not the coveted Golden Eagle. We looked valiantly for Condor while in Pinnacles National Park to no avail. How we hoped to see the Western Tanager while in Zion, but nope, it just wasn’t meant to be. None of those misses however were a bummer, we merely pivoted to whatever Plan B held for us and were grateful for what was right in front of us. We sweltered for the first couple of months out, even though there were some places in California that offered cooler evening temperatures. Now that we are in Colorado, we are enjoying hot days and cold nights–a delicious combo. Our last hoped for sighting on our adventure list is to see the tarantulas of southern Colorado and northern Texas, as September is their mating month. The males come out of the desert en masse to find their temporary sweetheart. Not only do we hope to see the “en masse” males but I hope also to see a mating ritual. Fingers crossed.
So OK, here is a True Confession: two days ago, our day began in the dark, and included an early morning moose search mission, a couple of short hikes, a stop in the funky town of Walden to wifi and have an ice cream, then setting back up at our camp at Stagecoach State Park. We discussed dinner, but I was engaged in reading about Wendall Berry in the couple of articles I had downloaded in Walden when we had cell service. Seemingly out of the blue, John said to me, “I think we’ve been traveling too long, you’re becoming impatient with me”. Oh my gosh, I was stopped in my tracks. I suddenly felt so sad — sad that he would find me acting impatient but mostly sad that I may have hurt his feelings. John is simply the best travel partner there is, he is thoughtful, generous, upbeat, and so fun to hang around with that the thought of my not manifesting gratitude at all times, towards him, just broke my heart. I certainly apologized and more importantly, I made a vow to myself to NOT be bitchy (or impatient!) again. Ever. (!)
So far, that is going well.
I write these travel blog updates on the MalleryMiles website; I post a link to what I have written on Facebook and Instagram, then I finish it up by using MailChimp to email the blog to a few friends who are not on social media. When I wrote my last blog post, about Moab, I was surprised when MailChimp alerted me that I had exceeded my allowed mailing capacity for the month. Wow! I have been using a free MailChimp account which I knew had some limits but I had not paid attention, until that message popped up. This led to an exploration of the admin side of the platform to find that I now have 124 subscribers! More Wow! But that was not the limiting factor; it was because I had been writing more often than usual which reflects not only that this is indeed a longer trip but also that I have shared my wonder of the abundant natural beauty we have seen. I wanted you to see it also, dear reader! So it is the fact that there are more subscribers than I knew about multiplied by the increase in frequency of my writing these travel blog updates that brought me over the limit. Looking deeper into the admin page, I was shocked to see that I have written and sent 99 blog post emails! That is how I know that this update is number 100! I could have waited until the beginning of September to email the update about Moab without upgrading my account, but I did not have the patience for that. Oh my, am I impatient after all?!
Now I have an inexpensive, entry level account with MailChimp, so I can write and send updates to my heart’s content! No worries, I will not go crazy, I promise. Since John and I spend nearly every moment together while we travel, we talk to each other, a lot. As this trip began, on Father’s Day, I was excited that 2027 would be another big year of vanlife travel. And, just as I have discovered that 3 months may be too long of a time to be away from home/friends/events/yard, I am also slowly coming around to staying home more next year than we have this year…Home Sweet Home. We have one more van trip planned this year — 3 weeks to Florida for family Thanksgiving — but after that, there are no van trips being considered until our annual birding trip in May. Wouldn’t that be something, if in fact, we only did one trip next year in Vanda?
