Maiden Voyage, Take 1

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It’s time to take the RV for a spin. We’ve had the RV sitting in the driveway. It’s been cleaned and some of our stuff is moved in. But we haven’t yet camped in it.

Looking down on our lonely RV dreaming of the beach while it snows.

As we get our house ready to rent while we are on this trip, it has consumed nearly all our time and energy. But the other half of this project to travel is getting the RV ready. With frazzled nerves and running late (which means it’s dark this time of year), we got to the campground. 

That’s when we realized we didn’t have keys to the compartments for hook ups.  

The whole purpose of the trip was test out the RV and our ability to do what we need to live in it, and now the trip is a bust. The reason we didn’t have the keys is because I lost them.

Yep, I lost the keys to the RV that we about to drive across the country.

Apparently, I lost the only keys we had to the side door and every outside compartment. I don’t know where or exactly when, but they are gone. It confirms my theory that stress breeds stress.

I’ve looked everywhere and retraced my steps. I’m feeling demoralized. The colder it gets here, the more I want to get traveling. Thankfully, we still had an ignition key. Now, we need to call a locksmith. It’s another obstacle, but it won’t keep us from leaving… I hope.

So, we made it to the campground and then turned around and came home. I’m so bummed. 

 “And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”

Randy Komisar

Gypsy Grandparents

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“However that may be, let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you.” (1 Cor. 7:17, NRSV)

Free to fly, yet happily grounded.

The first time I remember hearing the phrase gypsy bloodit was in reference to my grandparents. My father’s parents left their cocoon of a small town in rural Missouri near Kansas City, unlike many of their friends. My grandfather left as an adult to fight in World War II. After returning, he met my grandma and they settled down to married life. Soon they had a baby boy, my father. They moved around Missouri and then later to Colorado, where they lived when I met them. 

Growing up, I didn’t see them often, but they seemed to me to enjoy both variety and stability. On one visit, when they owned an art gallery near Pike’s Peak, I went to my first artist reception. On another, and in a different house, my Pa managed a truck stop and said hello to what seemed like every person in Colorado Springs, greeting them by name. But mostly, I remember my grandma working at the state deaf and blind school, a long-time career from which she retired. It was a nice, safe government job that was different every day and afforded them time off to travel, camp and visit friends and family. 

However, in my adult life and after they retired, they made several radical moves. First, they sold just about everything owned and bought a fifth wheel to travel. (Maybe that is where I first got the idea to travel in an RV.) I love that before they died they divided up the “stuff” among the family with no fighting or inheritance wars. (That was more than 20 years ago, and they are still going strong and just celebrated their 70-year wedding anniversary.) After a couple of years of being nomads, they decided to land in south Texas to enjoy warm sunshine and fresh limes, avocados and grapefruit. After that, they sold the fifth wheel and moved to northern Wisconsin, near my brother’s family with four young girls. As of this writing, they’ve settled down back again close to that small town in rural Missouri near Kansas City  – as much as people with gypsy blood living in the tension of opposites ever will ever settle. 

So I come by this need to experience new places quite naturally, but what I don’t fully understand is how to live with gypsy blood in middle age. As a youth, those of us who have wanderlust encoded in our genes move to new places or (sometimes fearfully) jump into an epic adventure. For retirees, travel is less adventurous but more comfortable with better financial stability. It’s commonly accepted in our country that after plugging away at a job for enough years to retire, these older Americans might buy a recreational vehicle and head for the sunshine that was missing from cubicle life in a windowless office. That scenario does not seem hugely adventurous, but my point is that both ends of adulthood – emerging and retiring –include adventures and leaving home. 

But what happens in between, during career building and having babies and buying the minivan? What happens when vacations only whet my appetite for something bigger? What happens when I love my university career at a “bricks and mortar” college and I don’t want to sell my house or give up my 85-pound chocolate lab? My husband is a mellowed adventurer, too, but we have three children in second and third grades (the third graders are twins). What does this need to do something and go somewhere mean for them? They, my husband and kids, are four of the five things that are more important than heeding the gypsy blood. The only other thing is my faith. If there is a conflict between faith or family and this mid-life adventure then they win.

But what if I can have both?

And here I find myself again in the tension of opposites. I want to go, but I’m tethered happily here. The individual part of me longs for an adventure, but I’m the mom in a family of five (plus a big dog). I am working hard in a career where passion meets purpose for me, and it’s incredibly fulfilling, but I need rest. I’m itching for something, but I don’t know what that something is yet. 

This is how adventures begin. There is an inexplicable restlessness yet a discomfort with leaving what is comfortable. It doesn’t make sense, and there is not enough information to logically explain it. Something pulls you towards it, but you don’t know if that something is friend or foe. It could be a disaster. If it’s an epic adventure, something disastrous is bound to happen. Change also is bound to happen, but when one person changes, it impacts the entire family, and they don’t always like it. Yet, when the credits roll on epic adventure movies, there is a sigh of satisfaction – and longing – because it was right.

 “When you were young, your right hemisphere or ‘right brain’ was in full force. It was the guy in charge, and it was the part of your brain that embraced curiosity and adventure and was constantly unafraid to ask Why?and Why not?…But as you grew older, the other hemisphere, the ‘left brain’ began to gain a voice. It began to say things like, ‘That’s impossible,’ or, ‘They will laugh at you,” or, ‘Don’t be foolish.’… As we grew up, most of us came to believe the left brain’s assertions, and as a result we lost the sense that awesome was around the corner.”


— Jon Acuff in Start.

Gypsy Blood

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As we continue our preparations to leave on this epic RV trip, I thought it might be interesting to think back on how we got to this place on the brink of an unknown adventure. I like a plan, but this is relatively unplanned.

This is how it started.

I have gypsy blood coursing through my body. I know in my being that it is true for me, even though I don’t even know exactly what that means. I don’t know enough about my ethnic heritage to know if I am descended from that notorious breed of free-spirited people who are depicted as loving colorful clothing and jangling jewelry, but based on what I do know, I am not. Yet, I have a wanderlust that courses through my veins, nourishing every cell in this human vessel, that seeks out new experiences and people… in a risk-adverse, safe and comfortable way.

That paradox is what drove the idea for this mid-life adventure. How could I go and stay at the same time? How could I take a risk and stay completely comfortable? How could I be nomadic and still live in Nashville? And how could I satisfy the need to live in this paradox with four other people, three of whom weren’t main decision-makers in our family but would be shaped by the impact of the decision? 

“Siri, what is the definition of ‘gypsy’?” I asked my phone. I love this feature.

“A member of a traveling people traditionally living by itinerant trade and fortune telling…” she began in her conversational, but still slightly robotic voice.

“Do you want me to continue?” she asked after reciting the full definition. 

“Yes,” I said, mentally on a tangent curiously wondering about the Romany language and possible Hindi roots of gypsy people.

“A nomadic or free-spirited person,” she said.

“That’s me!” I thought.

Yet, I’m packaged in such a safe, conservative wrapping, and that’s me, too. I’ve often said that I would have been a great hippie, except for the free love and drugs. I’m happily monogamous, and living in my world is mind-altering enough, thank you very much. But I’ll shake off convention, twirl to my own beat, and make bad fashion choices like my parents’ bell bottomed generation. 

My environment shapes me as much as my inherited gypsy blood. I can’t tease out one from the other. I was born in Northern California in 1970 to two young parents far away from their Midwestern homes, and perhaps that is where my life in the crux of this paradox began, with two young people on a grand adventure out west settling down to married life with a baby (me). But adventure inherently holds risk. What feels like loss and failure often is the impetus that opens a door to a new world of possibilities, so with a divorce, a second husband, and three passports to Germany, my mom bravely packed the moving boxes to move our family out of the country on the dime of the United States Air Force when I was four. What could be more adventurous than moving to Europe and beginning school in a foreign country? What could be safer than having the government provide base housing, access to American food, and a hospital for the arrival of my baby sister? Safe, secure adventures became a theme that continued when we moved back state-side to the Lone Star state, the great state of Texas where independence and trail blazing are valued highly.

Fast forward four and a half decades or so, and I started 2018 ruminating on options for celebrating my husband’s 50th birthday . My own half-century celebration was only a little more than two years away, and milestones often give rise to evaluating where you are in life. I’m comfortable in my career as a university professor. I have three treasured children who are thankfully now able dress, feed and groom themselves, and I want these precious little ones to have stability and security. I’m not a youthful adult packing up my Volkswagon to move to the Volunteer state beaming at all possibilities that awaited like I did after college. But I am itching for traveling adventure, one that is bigger than the states of California, Texas and Tennessee combined. 

Each heart beat pumps my gypsy blood to the cadence of, “Go, go, go.” But go where? Do what? I don’t yet know. What I do know is that a big adventure awaits, and internally I’m screaming with the thrill and terror of it. I am not gypsy at all, but I have gypsy blood.

“If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us.” 


Parker J. Palmer in Let Your Life Speak

Challenges, pt. 2

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The second hurdle to leaving is clearing our personal possessions out of the house, fixing and replacing things we have put off, and making it nice for guests.

Sigh.

We’ve all experienced the pain of moving and the disbelief at how much stuff we really have. I think is going to be a theme for us in the next few months as we learn to live with less and lighter things. As I look around at the piles of our treasured possessions, it’s starting to just look like stuff. I’m questioning a lot.

“Why did I keep that?” 
“Why do I have so many of these?” 
“What is this?”

Then there are the bins and boxes needed to pack. We are packing our stuff to leave it in the basement for seven months, but the boxes aren’t going to rattle around in a moving truck. They don’t need to be padded and protected, but they do need to be stacked. 

Professional organizers say that once you clear one space, you notice other spaces more and those start to cause discomfort. Yep. The more I do, the more I see that needs to be done. I think this could go on forever, but I’m so antsy to get going on our trip.

My strategy has been to start with the inner spaces. I started with closets and drawers. That just created a bigger mess that I could see, but I knew that what I could see is what we had left. Have I mentioned that we have too much stuff? That’s so apparent when you can see it all.

I’ve also been working on my own inner spaces, those parts of me that want a spare for the spare, just in case. I’ve been slowly realizing that more isn’t better, and it might be a lot worse. According to statista.com, there are 5,358 Walmart stores in the United States. I think we have access to what we will truly need on this trip, even if one of those essential widgets breaks. 

So maybe we can get by just fine without a spare. (Except a spare tire. I’m not willing to go that far.)

I don’t know exactly what it is going to be like living in an RV for months on end. I hope that we get used to the ease of less. I hope that I find that I have more time, because the stuff is not demanding as much of it. I got excited in our house kitchen this evening as I was rearranging the things that my husband put away in unusual places. With only one drawer in the RV, he’ll only have one option… and that means I will be able find it. 

You know, as we are clearing it out and minimizing, it already feels more restful, and that’s one of the goals of this sabbatical.

Challenges, pt. 1

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Our biggest hurdle to pulling out of the driveway on this epic RV trip is what to do with our house. 

We don’t want to leave it empty for seven months, so we’ve decided to list it on AirBnB and have a co-owner who will help us manage it (Thanks, Kathi!). I think it is a great solution because it will do three things: 

  1. The house won’t sit empty inviting theft or meth labs.
  2. We’ll make a little money to fund our home repairs and the trip.
  3. We’ll come home at the end of this to a clean house that is ready for guests. 

Doesn’t that sound great? Nothing but blue skies and rainbows thinking. This is generally where I live, in a place with over-optimistic thinking about possibilities. However, it is taxing my last bit of inner Pollyanna to get the house ready and listed to rent. I’ll write about the challenge of moving all our personal belongings out in the next post. Today, I’m working on the permit process that is required for short term rental properties (i.e. AirBnb or HomeAway). 

I like checklists.

I’m writing this blog post from Metro government offices as I wait in line to turn in my application. If you list your house to be rented before you get a permit, the city will revoke your permit for a year, so this is really important. In Nashville, the process is fairly lengthy and includes a home visit by the fire marshal. Taking care of details is not my strength and let’s face it, anything that requires a government office requires taking care of lots of details, some that you might not be aware of until you get there. (See my optimistic thinking lagging. I’m already expecting a negative surprise.) I will say that Nashville has a done an excellent job of outlining the process and creating a clear checklist, and I like checklists. 

They even have an online cue. 

Supposedly, you can just click on the link and sign up for an appointment. Then, you just show up at your appointment time. Sounds easy, right? According to the web site, it opens at 8:00 in the morning. At a few ticks left of 9:00, it’s still wasn’t working. Meanwhile, I wasted time at home thinking it would open any minute instead of just getting in line. Ugh! My adrenalin was pumping as I imagined a line out to the parking lot before I got there (clue #2 of my faulty thinking as I imagine worst case scenarios.)

I decided to give up on the electronic cue and show up to the Metro offices campus in person. Yes, it’s already formidable when it takes an entire campus to cut through governmental red tape. The zoning building permits screen was scrolling through numbers. There were 18 people in the cue, and the estimated wait was five hours. Thankfully, the short term rental permits line is much shorter. I’m number three. 

Uh-oh. 

The screen shows me in the cue with the last four numbers of my phone number, and it says it is waiting to begin. They sent me a friendly text informing me they’ll let me know when they are ready to start. What does that mean? Has the person I am waiting to see slept in or called in sick?  Am I going to sit here until the office closes only to be told to come back and do it again tomorrow? If I had followed the advice for getting in line in person on the web site, I would have been here two hours ago, and now the line hasn’t even started. I secretly peek at the other people in the waiting room to see if someone resembling Rip Van Winkle is here. With relief, I notice that most of them are clean shaven except one scruffy dude. 

I know better than to start calculating wasted time in my head, yet I do. Suddenly, this time sitting in a hard, black plastic chair facing a TV showing Pickler & Benis prime time for me. I’m missing out on hundreds of things I could be doing right this minute. My morning time is my productive time, and I am convinced I’m wasting it sitting here, but this kind of thinking only irritates me and does nothing to make the line move faster. 

Thankfully, I brought my computer… so I guess I’m not really wasting time, but I’m still grumpy. 

I wait and wait. 10:00…12:00…3:00… 9:30… That’s what I expect to happen, but I actually don’t wait long enough to even finish the blog post. The woman who reviewed my application also defied my expectations. I expected the air to go gray as I approached her desk and to see her delighted face in animation as she stamped a big DENIED across my application. In reality, she was quite pleasant and helpful. I had one small hiccup, but later that day, my application was approved and I was able to contact the fire marshal for the last hurdle to getting a permit. 

I have been procrastinating on this application for months. There are a lot of reasons for that. We weren’t ready to move out of the house, we didn’t yet have an RV, and I had other things screaming for attention. But mostly, I just hate working through government bureaucracies because I am convinced that it will be tedious, time-wasting and tiresome. It’s my own baggage from growing up in a military family, but I am the one who made this challenge so difficult. I am the one who dreaded it and resisted it and walked in expecting Dilbert’s office to greet me.

And I was wrong. 


“Never give a negative thought an inch or it will take a mile.” 
― Matshona Dhliwayo

Minimal Stuff, Maximum Adventure

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I am intrigued by the idea of minimalism, but since having kids, we’re more of maximists. If one is good, then four are better. The toys breed in dark closets while we aren’t looking and spontaneously reproduce. As we stumble around in a sleep deficit, having more of each thing means we might be able to find one of the things we are looking for. Yet, this sabbatical adventure means some serious downsizing. 

It’s like moving, but we’re also limiting the quantity and weight of what we move. I’m a pretty serious packer, a skill I learned in college moving with a Volkswagon, but in an RV, every pound reduces the gas mileage and therefore costs money. We’re going from a 2,600 square feet house to less than 300 square feet for five people.

I have a confession.

This is one of the most appealing parts of this trip for me. I want our family to unplug from our fast-paced, stuff-packed life for long enough to really experience more simple living. I’ve caught myself asking, “What is the very least we need?” It isn’t 800 pens, 8 bottles of lotion, and more stuffed animals than I can count. I have a hunch it is much less than I think, but I don’t yet know where that line is. I hope we figure it out before leaving, but even if we don’t we can shed stuff on the way.

There’s a range of opinions in the minimalist movement ranging from counting and limiting every item down to paperclips to a more relaxed approach that emphasizes keeping things that are in line with your core values and eliminating the rest. This is probably where I fall. I’m not interested in limiting stuff just to limit. I am interested in less stuff and more of what really matters.  

But I am only one of five people impacted by this sabbatical space. My 8-year-old, who I’ll identify as Z, was pretty upset that he couldn’t bring everything he wanted. I had been trying to warn the kids that they could only bring a limited amount of toys, and maybe I was a little too adamant, ahem. But, after we talked about what really mattered to him and pulling out his bin to pack, he realized he could fit it all. In other words, he learned to identify which toys he really valued and that he plenty of room for what was most important. 

If only every teachable moment went this well.

I doubt we’ll ever fully be minimalists, but this is a great opportunity to experience what it is like to minimize our stuff. Maybe it’s a chance for me to learn to identify what I really value and see that I have plenty of room for what is most important, too. I have enough time, enough ideas, and enough energy. Well, that last one is yet to be determined. Stick around to see how that works out. 

When you stop trying to grasp, own, and control the world around you, you give it the freedom to fulfill you without the power to destroy you. That’s why letting go is so important: letting go is letting happiness in.

Leo Babauta

The Journey Begins

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There is something incredibly hopeful and motivating about starting something new. I love the crisp, clean pages of a new planner. I love a blank piece of paper, just waiting for me to capture and claim an idea. It’s not quite the same in the digital world, but I love starting with a blank page for this blog, too.

Like that blank piece of paper, I don’t know exactly how this blog will develop and grow, but friends and family have asked us to keep them updated, and this seemed like the best way to document our travels and send photos. Maybe it will be a record of masterful writing, and publishers will pound on my door begging me to turn it into a book. (Quit laughing. That’s not out of the realm of possibility.) Maybe it will be boring ramblings that only my mother will read (thanks, Mom) while two others scroll through for the pictures.

It might be an epic success or an epic disaster, and more likely something in between, but the next seven months are likely to be epic. This year is going to be different from anything we have done before because I have been awarded a sabbatical from my professor responsibilities to write a book. I’m still blinking in surprise that I work for a university that will pay me to do something I have dreamed of doing for years. Does it get better than that? Yes, actually, it does. In the sabbatical application, they recommend that you get away from the university, so we took that advice quite literally to pursue another dream.

Meet dream #2.

IMG_2321
Our new RV and three excited children.

He’s a 2006 Georgie Boy Class C motorhome that we bought to travel around the country until July. We haven’t named him (I think it’s a him) yet. We’ve rented an RV twice in the past, and in my opinion, it is the best way for our family to travel. I love the idea of having a potty and kitchen with us wherever we go. Since we already homeschool, this works for our schedule, too, and I have experience writing daily while on the road. So, it gets us away from the university and allows me to write and rest, my two goals for this trip.

Write. I have wanted to write another book for a while, and when a publisher approached me after a conference presentation, I knew I wanted to accept. Who wouldn’t, right? I’ll share more about this project in later posts I’m sure, but the short version is that I am writing (along with my co-author Dr. Melanie Morris) a book on play therapy with adolescents and adults. In it, I’m outlining my approach to creative play therapy which I teach in my classes.

Rest. Every time I see the word sabbatical, I am reminded of the sabbath rest. I need some rest and rejuvenation. Tim (my husband) and I both do, and living more in tune with nature seems like a good way to get it.

Family Fun.This isn’t one of the two goals, but I do expect this to be a byproduct. Yeah, I know that living in a mobile tin can with five people and an 85-pound chocolate lab isn’t going to be a dream every minute, but I do believe that close physical proximity builds close emotional bonding.  And our backyard is going to be amazing and ever-changing.

I hope you’ll join us on this adventure. I think it is one that we will talk about for the rest of our lives, hopefully with fondness. I expect we’ll have some ups and downs, the best kind being over mountains. We’ll learn some lessons, have unexpected RV repairs, and wish we had done things differently. Still, it feels like such a gift to be able have a solid six months to travel and write and spend time with my family.

Welcome to Sabbatical Space.

“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta