Life Updates

I wasn’t sure if I was going to say anything on the sad passing of the Rev. Dr. Everett Lees. It feels presumptuous to say words about someone you haven’t been close with for a long time. However, his passing has been sitting in my mind and left me with a small thought on strong character.

Everett and I became friends my senior year in high school along with his other dear friend, Steven Anderson. We were all in debate club together and spent a good amount of time both in and out of school for that year. We were an unlikely set of friends, especially Everett and I.

The nice thing about new journey is that you can set your own baselines. For the first day I got up early enough to take Heidi out for a walk. She is working on her manners and I’m working on loosening up my ankle. Neither makes for a rapid pace, but it does make for a pleasant walk through a pretty town. We took a nice stop at the Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple and another to see what silent film was playing at The Mini Melba Cinema at the crack of dawn. Did 1.83 miles at a 25'49"/MI pace.

Well, it’s September and now approaching my birthday. And of course, as a middle-aged man, I can predictably start getting those little pangs of anxiety at another year’s passing which lead many down the dark path of impulse sports car purchases or hair plugs. To be honest, I’m actually in a very good place in my life and have little to push me towards these darker parts of men’s hearts. I have a job that is rewarding, a loving family, a nice house and a relatively tolerable dog. All in all, things are looking bright. However, I suspect, that my experience is not uncommon with those suddenly finding themselves wrestling with how to make a payment on their new Corvette. I suspect, most midlife crises have more to do with the sense of time’s rapidity than with legitimate complaints with one’s station, and in that, I’m certainly feeling the results of accelerating decrepitude.

So Christmas this year was a bit more eventful that we had planned. It started as expected, with an excited five year old getting out of bed well before dawn and shrieking with joy when she discovered her milk, cookies, and carrots had all been consumed by Santa and his helpers.  Coffee was made for the bleary eyed parents and the opening of presents was comensed and finished by 7:30 AM.  

Marfa was nothing short than a complete surprise. When I was last out in this country, Marfa was still unknown as the art community it had already become. To us, it was a small county seat out in the high desert, just one of those places to pass through to get down to the glories of Big Bend National Park. In fact, in the half dozen times I went to Big Bend in my youth, we never even went through there.

Off to the big city in the Airstream. I’m more of the wilderness type and Grace is definitely more the city girl so we try to mix it up with our travel locations. However, Austin is definitely a location we can both agree on.

The curse of the urban RV visit is that locations to stay in tend to be both over priced and over crowded. Thankfully, Austin provides a welcome alternative in McKinney Falls State Park. Just a few miles from downtown Austin, this amazingly expansive state park offers beautiful and enormous spots with lots of trails and incredible quantities of wildlife for essentially being in an urban setting. With the exception of the inevitible college kid party on the weekend (this is hook’em horn country after all) this place was a wonderful quiet home base for exploring the city. It also gave us a chance to have our first campfire since we’ve been on the road. Can’t believe it took us this long!

So, we are finally on the road again and it feels great. We needed some time in Oklahoma to get our affairs in order and to spend much wanted time with friends and family. However, we were certainly ready to get back out on this new adventure of ours.

We started off our journey with a quick jaunt down to Dallas for a business meeting with a client. It’s a new experience hauling one’s house around for business meetings and a quite pleasant one at that. There’s something nice about being with family at home after business meetings in a strange city. We didn’t really get to spend much time poking around, but we’ve spent more than enough time in the big D and we were ready to hit the road.

After the somewhat frantic out and back travel we did for the first three months in the Airstream, we were ready for a break. While we were enjoying the sights, having to head out to a location for only a week or two before heading back to Oklahoma was getting a little tiring. Since we had the holidays coming up plus the kids’ birthdays, we decided to stop traveling for the year in the middle of October.

Falling behind is always my terror in blogging. I’ll get busy, things come up and the next thing I know you I’m a couple of months behind on posts. I then feel overwhelmed with the amount of writing I have to do to get caught up mixed with guilt of not doing what I need to do. Then I just give up …

Well, I don’t want to give up so soon, so in this case I’m going to have to make a compromise to keep this thing going. So here are inadequate but necessary catch-up posts of our travels from the end of this year. I’ll try to be better going forward.

Proving that blogging is the first thing to suffer as soon as stuff gets interesting, we’ve been horribly quiet over here lately. It’s been a whirlwind of activity as we’ve purchased our trailer, set it up and hit the road for our first work trip.

After much going back and forth, we decided we wanted the Airstream Flying Cloud 27FB. It’s a nice compromise between the compact length of the 25FB and it’s slightly awkward sleeping accommodations and the spacious 30 foot which would severely limit some of the places we would like to go. As soon as we were sure that our house sale was going through, we began a nationwide search for our perfect trailer. We finally found the one we wanted at Colonial Airstream in New Jersey. Even though neither of us have any real towing experience, we went with that old adage about fortune favoring the brave, and dashed to the East Coast to pick up our new home and bring her back to Oklahoma!