Four Weeks

We left home four weeks ago today. The trip will be 18 weeks long, so we are 2/9 of the way through our adventure. It seems like a good time to reflect on the day-to-day reality of being on the road.

Driving hasn’t been too bad so far. Some days in the car have been long, but the highways have been great and traffic has cooperated. There was that one day we had to get the back brakes replaced...but that’s not a very exciting story. When I was planning out our route and considering the length of some of the drives, I often imagined us leaving a place by 9AM so that a 4-hour drive would have us arriving at another place by 1PM. In reality it can be difficult to eat, get everyone ready, and have the text packed up by 9 depending on the weather, the activities of the previous day, and the quality of sleep we have had. The result has been that traveling days take a bit more time than I thought, but we try to make the best of them. For instance, on the long drive from New Orleans to Galveston we stopped in Jennings Louisiana for a quick grocery ship and then had a nice picnic at Oil and Gas Park, a lovely park despite its name.

Every day brings chores - meal planning, shopping, cooler monitoring (our cooler is powered but we don’t always have access to power), dishes, sniff-testing clothes for laundry status, laundry about once a week, car tidying...all of these things are becoming part of the rhythm of our days. We have been eating pretty well and trying to be smart about our grocery budget. If we were on a one-week vacation I wouldn’t think too hard about food, but our bodies and our wallets both can’t afford to eat ‘vacation food’ for this many weeks. Camp cooking requires a little bit of extra thought and planning, but everything tastes better outside. I am reminded of one of our cold (around freezing!) mornings in Cloudland Canyon when Voych and I enjoyed some strawberry pancakes and leftover sausage directly from the griddle as we cooked. For dinner we have enjoyed tacos, lentil curry soup, salmon with quinoa and salad, marscapone pasta...every meal seems more delicious than the last, even emergency tuna noodle surprise!

Writing about the trip and planning our next stop is an ongoing task. Managing internet access can be tricky - we have one cellphone with a US SIM card, so when we have access to cell service and electrical outlets it is easy to access the internet - we just have to be careful not to use too much data. We are at the end of a three night stay in Galveston where we have not had electricity, and my phone is hovering around 30% battery despite plugging it in when we take short trips to the beach (that gets me about 2%) and in the washroom when I brush my teeth (3% if I brush really, really well). This means we don’t have the luxury of browsing the internet lazily...if we need to do research, banking, email, etc., we have to be efficient. It’s the same with blogging. We can use the iPad to wrote posts offline, but only one of us can write at a time and we are perpetually behind because we don’t have a great deal of downtime for writing. To publish a post requires tethering the iPad to the phone, and that eats up power and data. It would help if we all learned to be a bit more succinct, but that doesn’t seem to be in our nature. ;)

I could write lots more here, but it’s time to wake everyone up and get the campsite packed up for another move. We will work on a post about New Orleans in the car today if all goes well.