The Road Begins

Welcome to our blog.  This is our first attempt to publish anything online – hampered primarily by our baby boomer status and abject lack of literary talent.  But we are retiring soon (I, from my profession and Marcia, from the daily care and feeding of her husband), so we plan to have more time on our hands to travel and write.  With this blog, we hope to chronical our American travel adventures over the next several years with our 25-foot Airstream trailer.

A few years ago, I was infected with the “I’ve got to have an Airstream” bug.  Marcia, however, remained disease-free. The only cure for my malady, as I saw it, was to buy one.  In 2011 we became the proud owners of a new trailer.  This was a sweet wagon with iconic polished aluminum exterior skin, blond euro-ply cabinetry, tandem aluminum wheels, tidy galley, and head (kitchen and bathroom for you landlubbers), shower, front dinette, and rear double bed.  The trailer came with two flat-screen TVs (more than we had in our house at the time).  I was all about impressing Marcia on our first “glamping” adventure.

I had camped all my life.  I started off with only a Visqueen plastic sheet covering my sleeping bag but gradually upgraded to a real tent and eventually to a tent trailer.  So when I came home with an Airstream in-tow, I felt that I had reached the pinnacle of camping comfort and “impressibility.” This symbol of outdoor recreational status, however, was lost on my wife.  I knew then what it must feel like when you buy a $200 pair of designer jeans and nobody notices.  Despite my pointing out the air-frame construction, Dura-Torque axles, Fantastic Fan, Blu-ray media player, and dimmable LED cabin lights, Marcia remained unimpressed.  To her, a camping trailer was a camping trailer.  My efforts to impress eventually paid off on our first extended trip when we were parked at an Alabama rest area in the “Trucks and Cars with Trailers” section, right next to two “good-ole-boys” in a decrepit Ford truck with mud splattered on the windshield and an ATV in the bed, who commented, “I reeeally like yooour Airstream”. It was then that Marcia first came to appreciate our little trailer named Seymour AmeriCan.

We have pulled Seymour on short summer vacations to Florida, to Michigan and Wisconsin, to Utah and the Rocky Mountains, and to South Dakota and Wyoming. But now that we are freeing ourselves of the bonds-of-employment, we plan to really “take to the open road.”  We’ll keep y’all posted.

 

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

 -Walt Whitman