Where we've been up to September 2014 in the Wildcat...

visited 38 states (76%)
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Washington, the traveling village....

     We are in Ocean Shores, Washington. It’s lovely, the beach is a few hundred yards away, down a grassy path. I am explaining, yet again, to our new neighbor, why we have Colorado plates but still this 32-foot can is our home. I am telling him that we are here, caravanning with 6 other families and he says, “So you are gypsies!” That makes me laugh, in the year we have been out here no one has said it but I am sure plenty have thought it. I have grown up with the nickname “gypsy”, or gypsfelia, having a father with an intricate vocabulary and a strange sense of humor. (I have also been lovingly named moosedrool at times!) So I am happy to embrace this man’s interpretation of the situation. He is staying in a tent next to us, behind his sister's Airstream. He is a Vietnam vet who lives at the foot of Rainer Mountain. This weekend he is visiting his sister, who travels with her two dogs, one whose back legs don’t work and must be carried out to enjoy the sun. She hauls a gorgeous Airstream around, a solo traveler.   

      They are but one of a hundred stories I have heard as we move from place to place. That is half the fun of this journey. The people we meet are amazing and many of them attest to the kindness of “RV” communities. They are often very open-minded. And, to be fair, they can afford to be. These are not their grandkids out here on the road, we are not their kids forsaking stability for experience. Each time someone tells us how much they admire the choice we’ve made, I wonder if they would feel the same if we were their family?  The follow up questions are always the same, “How do you support this lifestyle?” And I tell them of my amazing husband who spends all night tucked into a little desk in the corner of our slide, working on the computer and then trying to sleep in the daytime while we do school mere feet from his bed. Thank god for earplugs!  They ask about school and I tell them we homeschool, which has become so commonplace it seems that people rarely bat an eye. Once these formalities are out of the way people begin to tell amazing stories that detail how they got to this point. And more often than not they give us the best ideas for what to see, and where to go. The ebb and flow of this traveling community is so unique!

Barbra...Where have you been all my life? With your crab...

     And yet, there are pieces that are so classic. I love that most mornings my friend Kimberly and I wake before the rest of our family and meet for coffee. We aren’t much for gossip so we talk about kids and husbands and laundry and dogs and educating on the road. It is so much like the picture I have painted in my head of the idyllic home of the fifties. Women meeting for coffee or talking over the fences about the home fires. I realize I am getting to be a stay at home mom, finally! Three of the men meet in one of the rigs to work during the day, on their computers. Or they go into town and work from coffee shops if the internet signal is too low.  We meet for cocktails and card games at night while the kids live the idyllic lifestyle we so wanted for them. They are running in packs,  (or maybe herds?) between the campers and the playground. Today, they are digging holes two feet in diameter and nearly as deep, all around the volleyball court. There are 8 families here this time, we are all members of Thousand Trails so we move from TT to TT in groups as it suits people.  Many of us are able to do 2 weeks in before we spend a week out of the system, others are able to do three weeks and move from park to park. We become a traveling neighborhood. Each month the houses are in a different space, the view changes but everything else is pretty much the same. We take the kids on homeschool fieldtrips, walk all our dogs together and engage in “village” parenting. The families here are varied, from un-schoolers, to road schoolers to people like myself with an (overly) strict curriculum. Some are computer programmers, some sell natural oils.  Many are gluten free, some are paleo some are vegan. (there is never a shortage of Almond milk to borrow.) And, just as in the suburbs, some have amazing rigs, others have installed a residential fridge and there is a constant one-upping of gadgets. In our circles there is a clear division of people who own vitamix-ers and those who have not yet succumbed to the seduction. I won’t even go into the Great Berkey debate of 2014. (Clearly the Berkey is good and right.) We have heated discussions, on the weekly radio show, about whether or not one should have a washing machine in their rig or take it to the laundry mat and do six loads all at once. All in all, traveling in a village mirrors suburban life to a great degree. In fact, it's time for tea and a lesson in Dutch from Pieter and Clementine next door! (Yes they do have a vita mixer... We won't discuss the Berkey...)

(Picts from our field trip to Pike Street Market..)

Kimberly, Dominick and husband Christopher

This is Just THREE of the families!

   

The GUM wall! Chewed gum, oh Yum!!!!

(For more information check out my friend Kimberly’s group Fulltime Families. She is the sole reason we are able to find each other and build these relationships, an extraordinary woman, she has taken a virtual community and made it a physical reality!)

Brand new on the Road family of 8! Welcome!

Our Very First Beach Fire!!!

My peeps!

    

Steamboat Lake

             We NEVER get to go camping anymore! Isn’t that odd? We live in a camper but never camp! So it was wonderful in Colorado to go camping with part of our “old” camping crew! We spent a week up at Steamboat Springs lake and had a wonderful time! We got to meet Jenny and Joel’s wonderful parents, the Chavira’s joined us and we had a great time! We also got to see Marcus Chavira in action as he figured out his first pop-up crisis! Yay Marcus! So love our camping crew, thanks guys!

            

                   

                         

Lord of the Flies.....

     

A mini version of Lord of the Flies is playing out on the playground. While unnerving to me, it isn’t going unnoticed as a ring of parents nonchalantly stroll around the perimeter. It feels like a 1960’s spy movie. We are lurking, I am pretending to walk the dog, that one “looks” like he’s taking out the trash. Another parent seems to be intently inspecting the tailgate of his truck. A mom pushes her daughter on the swing but all of us are really just observing the unfolding mele. Why is this noteworthy? Because none of these parents are rushing in to stop it. No one is calling anyone else’s mom because someone made fun of their child’s hair. No one is calling the teacher because their daughter was pushed over during tag. No principals are being involved because they are pointing nerf guns at each other. It is unmitigated, childhood bliss, with all the dirt that accompanies it. Skinned knees because someone didn’t use the slide appropriately, 3 seconds of a hurt feeling because someone experienced defeat. Stained t-shirts from falling down “dead” on the grass over and over, no adults needed to call fair or unfair.
             

    My heart skips a beat as my son points a gun at another kid, pulls the trigger and yells BANG! This is exactly the behavior we have been trained, and in turn, trained kids not to do. I wait for the other child to scream and run home, instead he falls down “dead”.  Just as the unspoken rules dictate, a pow or a bang and your dead. You have to lie down for 1 minute. No adult told them that, they worked it out on their own, just as they picked sides, and boundaries and created the intricate plot to go along. Kids from 6 to 13 are playing together harmoniously. No one telling them they can’t play, it’s not right, or it’s inappropriate. I am torn between what is “right” and what is healthy. 

     I call Jacob over and ask about the game. "It's great, one kid didn't want to be a zombie, so we told him he could watch or be some other thing. He sat down with a gun for a minute and the next he was up playing. Now he's a Zombie too." Totally self regulating. 

     Don’t misunderstand me, I am still your good ‘ol bleeding heart girl. Gun control, anti-bullying, don’t hurt each other’s feelings girl. But, having spent the last 13 years writing up reports for the most asinine childhood offenses has made scenes like this a bit refreshing. Where is the line, have we crossed it? How far back? When do kids get to be kids?

And then, Aiden comes over.

“Mom, we are playing cowboys and Native American’s! I got to be a Navajo, I got em all!”  The paradigm has shifted. They have found a way to make the inappropriate appropriate. Until tomorrow anyway.  

     

You tube movie from Fulltime Nomads

We had an amazing time at home in Castle Rock! So much fun, we made a little movie of our adventures! 
Enjoy...
Castle Rock Movie

Hummttling

     We have lost three tires and two rims in less than two weeks. The problem with a flat tire on a full time rig is that we have big old honkin’ 10 ply tires. A blowout is ugly and the ten ply tend to give us a slow leak rather than the explosion mid highway. That is the theory anyway, didn’t really happen that way the last two times.  But, as you saw from our last post, we worked through it. It was, to say the least, expensive.

     If I haven’t said it before, it’s important to know that the average, (aka in our price range) fifth-wheel isn’t intended for full timing. It’s meant to hold up to the kind of abuse that “normal” people give it. Every other weekend, three months a year is pushing it. So, things break. A lot. Like, EVERYTIME WE STOP. Here is our average accident report.

Monday: Slide went in, weather stripping did not.

Tuesday: Tried to drain the blacktank, there was a clog of toilet paper.

Wednesday: Left the Vent cover open, mechanism got stripped.

Thursday: Crushed my favorite hat in the bedroom slide…again….

Friday: Boys left a drawer open a crack, bounced and wiggled and broke off it’s track.

Saturday: The steps finally gave way and we need a welder.

Sunday: Sink handle breaks off in Aiden’s hand….mysteriously

     That’s one week. We are on week 53! So you can understand why Alan and I are on high alert when something sounds a bit off from the normal routine. And today, at 5:43 a.m. we heard a strange humming. Or was it rattling?  We’ll call it Hummttling.

     It was in my bathroom, (yes, we have two bathrooms, it’s my one indulgence, don’t judge me. Did I mention it’s the size of a phone booth?). At first I thought it must have to do with the Fonzie lighting. We “lovingly” call it Fonzie lighting because after you turn on the switch, you have to give it a loving punch on the wall just below the mirror, followed up with the iconic, “heyyyyy” to make it turn on. Yes, I am certain the Heyyyy is necessary, I’ve tested the theory. At any rate, I Fonzie-ed the light switch but the hummttling didn’t stop. I climbed up on the toilet and turned off the vent fan, (it’s REALLY HIGH!!!) but the noise continued. Alan raced around half awake trying the fan from the stove, flicking on and off light switches. Finally he shut down every port from the breaker and still the noise persisted. I had a brief flashback to the tell tale heart but then realized it’s been years since I had anyone hidden beneath the floorboards.  We both simultaneously realized it had to be something that was run on our battery, as the sound continued without shore power. Hmmmm, we returned to the bedroom banging on walls, flicking switches and still the Hummttling continued. I was filled with images of multi-thousand dollar bill repair bills, a faulty slide that wouldn’t retract or, even worse, an electrical fire when Alan started laughing like a madman. He opened up the medicine cabinet and pulled out his hummulting “electric” toothbrush. (Umm, isn’t that a misnomer?).  We both collapsed back into bed laughing hysterically, relief rushing over us that maybe this week it could only be a weld job on the steps, not a tear down behind the wall. Just as we started to drift back to sleep, the car alarm of the site next to us went off.

“I’ll fonzie the light and we can brush our teeth.” Ok, I’ll rig the coffee maker to reach the outlet, we’ll pack up and head out.” “Don’t forget, the bottom step is off, watch out.” “Don’t turn on the Microwave if the air is on.” “Got It”.

And we are off.

     (No, none of these pictures are from the BearMouth Chalet here in Rock Creek where we are staying, but they are lovely!)