Airstreams

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!

So, my three weeks off is coming to an end.  It’s been an amazing whirlwind of activity that has moved us closer to our dream of the open road than the last few months combined.

This week was a slow return towards normalcy. I personally spent most of the week doing client work, cleaning email and getting business work taken care of after the craziness of the last two weeks.  Kind of nice to write some code again. I didn’t think I would miss it so soon.

I think there is an inverse correlation between the frequency of blogging and how busy someone is. The silence here should be indicative how exactly how insane the last week was for the both of us. However, as far as making progress on our dreams, this was the best week yet.

We started off at a fairly calm pace. Mark and I did a large quantity of tree pruning, replaced one wall of paneling on the old detached garage and finished getting the porch squared up and ready to go. Grace continued getting ready for our estate sale which was scheduled for this last Saturday.

It’s been amazing to see what can get done in a week if you can get the time to focus on it.  I started this week with a laundry list of home and garden tasks, some of which I had been ignoring for years.  I end this week with some major projects done and progress on many others.

The major task of this week was my front porch which has been long needing to be re-decked. With diligent effort, Mark and I were able to finish this, which is the most daunting of my repairs, within the week.

It’s been a frustrating few weeks for me on the home liquidation front.  Partially, I felt stuck in a rut of analysis paralysis; constantly planning and no action.  However, mostly it just not finding time to get anything done. Between my day job, my side work on Fore & Aft Design and just the stuff that we have to do to keep our lives afloat, there just wasn’t enough hours in the day.