This is why we do what we do

Living full time in a motorhome elicits a lot of questions from both friends and strangers. Most are FAQs, centered around the necessities of daily living, like, what do you eat? Where do you stay? How do you get Internet? What happens to your poop?

Stuff like that. We get these so frequently that our responses are well rehearsed. And we never begrudge the inquisitor, even when they ask a question we’ve already answered 1,000 times. Folks just share a lot of common ground around what they really want to know about life on the road.

But one day, I was in a conversation with one of the regulars at the brewery where Beth and I work summers. He asked a different question, simple, profound and insightful. Way off the FAQ. Brandon knows the backstory. We traded a life of domestic tranquility for one of considerable uncertainty. We sold the house, got rid of most of our stuff and hit the road to discover America.

“Any regrets?” he asked.

That threw me. Nobody had ever asked before, so I had no prepared response. “Wow,” came my pithy reply. Momentarily stumped, I really had to give it a think. I imagine Brandon and Vicki could smell the wood burning as my brain went after the task.

“You know, there’s stuff I miss,” I began, faking it, really. I was fumbling for a flashlight in the dark. “I miss friends and family. I miss my Weber grill. I miss the garage,” I said. The garage was by far my favorite room in the house, where I could take things apart, make household repairs and put my tools through their paces.

I wasn’t exactly dodging his question. I was buying time, bridging my way to an answer.

As I was flopping around, the vision cleared. I imagined all the places we’d experienced. The Grand Canyon. San Diego. Chicago. Valley of Fire in Nevada. Arches, Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Death Valley, White Sands, Antelope Canyon, Yosemite, only to name a few.

Much of the American west simply cannot be appreciated through photography. It’s just too big. Vast landscapes that literally take your breath away under a sky so blue it looks like it was Photoshopped. Appreciating them demands first-hand exposure. You must be immersed in them, taking them in with all your senses.

We’ve peered over the edge of Hoover Dam. Been eyeball-to-eyeball with 2,000-pound bison. Heard the snarls of raucous wild seals. Seen trees 1,000 years old and 300 feet tall, a waterfall a half mile high. Been awed by the rock art of our Western predecessors. We’ve seen sunsets that felt like we were inside an oil painting. We’ve stood beneath a towering telescope, scanning the night sky for dark energy. I’ve put my boots in the footprints of dinosaurs.

When Beth signed up to volunteer for the annual Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City, Nevada, we became fast friends with some of the coolest, friendliest and most creative people we know. How else would we have ended up buddies with so many people in the Pacific time zone?

And we’ve been welcomed in hundreds of breweries, coast to coast, most of which came with new friends.

So, yeah, I miss some of my stuff. I miss proximity to friends and family. Life on the road can be a challenge. We have to figure out the answers to all those FAQs. Staying on top of safe places to stay, finding a decent laundromat, fixing all the things that break, sourcing fresh water and getting rid of the not-so-fresh – chores that must be attended to just to get through the day. Not every day is a picnic – but that’s life, no matter where you live it. It was a huge risk, financially, materially and emotionally. The physical risk isn’t zero.

But the dividends have been nearly indescribable. It’s in those moments when we find ourselves at the epicenter of a 360-degree landscape like the one miniaturized in the photo above that the answer to Brandon’s question comes into clear focus. A simple, unequivocal no. No regrets, none whatsoever.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

TO BE CONTINUED

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