the roamer writes

Or…a little about me!

“What are you doing?! I thought you guys were going to the bathroom!”

My husband looked at me with complete and utter confusion as my daughter and I walked back toward him from the gas station parking lot. He stood in the Taco Bell parking lot next door, supervising our two-year-old son as he attempted to “walk” our dog. 

“The bathrooms are out of order,” I said, attempting a calm and measured tone despite my growing frustration and full bladder. 

“Okay,” Kevin said calmly. He was either unbothered by my unraveling before his eyes or hoping he could still stop the spiral. “Do you guys just want to walk over to the grocery store and see if they have a bathroom?”

I followed his gaze past the Taco Bell to a grocery store in a strip mall that seemed a thousand miles away at present to me, six months pregnant, when it was only another parking lot over in my husband’s version of reality. 

“No, I don’t want to walk to that grocery store,” I whined, the calm tone eroding quickly. “I want to pee right here!” 

I pointed at the grassy median separating the two parking lots. Ironically, we’d been trying (unsuccessfully) for the last ten minutes to get our dog to pee on said grass before putting him back in the truck.

Ten minutes earlier, we’d arrived at this Taco Bell planning to get out, stretch our legs, let the dog out, eat quickly and efficiently inside, go potty and wash our hands, and continue on our road trip from Michigan to New York. The weather seemed nice, so the kids, the dog and I opted to sit outside at one of the picnic tables while Kevin swung through the drive thru to pick up his mobile order. I had to pee, but I figured I could wait until he got the food since everyone was starving. 

The weather was nice, but the tiny, nearly microscopic, red spiders crawling all over the picnic tables were not nice. We waited for Kevin to get out of the drive thru and then followed our blue Toyota Tundra through the parking lot while he decided on a parking space. 

He got out and gave me a questioning look, waiting for me to explain. 

“We have to eat inside,” I said. “The tables are covered in tiny red spiders.”

“Of course they are. Well, we can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “The dining room is closed.”

“See, that’s why these people are eating in their cars!” my daughter (5) chimed in, pointing to three different parked cars with Taco Bell patrons inside them. 

And so the great viable bathroom search began. We finally struck gold at the grocery store in the faraway distance, and what was meant to be a 30-minute lunch stop somehow became an hour and a half. 

Twenty minutes earlier, I had suggested to Kevin that we start a travel podcast with the caveat that, if we were going to have enough to talk about on the podcast, we needed more things to “happen” to us on our trips.

The universe understood the assignment, and it delivered. 

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This is one of many road trips we’ve taken with our kids, and people always ask us, “How do you survive driving across the country with two young kids?”

I’m still trying to figure out how people survive the monotony of regular life day after day without spontaneously deciding to pack up and move, or at the very least, travel across the country. 

We’ve spent a decade “roaming”, from our hometowns in the Pacific Northwest all the way to the Catskills in Central New York, where we own a 20-acre property (there’s a lot more to be said about that). We’ve unsuccessfully tried to “put down roots” in multiple places, foolishly thinking that buying a home would make us feel more tethered. That’s what everyone else was doing, after all, and it seemed to be working for them! 

We’ve landed somewhere new and are starting to feel the pull, once again, to be more “normal” and stay in the same place. There are a lot of things we like about where we’re at, and there’s a strong desire to conform to the social norms, especially as our kids get older, to give them stability and consistency and local schools, friends, and sports. We don’t take any of that lightly — in fact, each time we’ve moved it’s been to try and make our kids’ lives better. 

There are so many more choices to be had nowadays. We both work remotely and have been so lucky to find employers who have allowed us to relocate multiple times. It’s a blessing and a curse to have the resources to make a different choice or try something new. In some ways, I find myself longing for the simplicity my parents had, with local jobs that wouldn’t have allowed them to move, and the stability of my childhood home that I lived in until I was 21 years old. 

But there’s a lot of nostalgia attached to those memories, and a lot has changed in this world we live in. I think about how my children will someday go to therapy for one thing or another, and will inevitably bring up some childhood grievances about how we raised them, and I ask myself how much it will really bother me if they gripe about how we moved too often, went on too many road trips, visited too many national parks, did too much camping and hiking, and didn’t play enough organized youth sports. 

Some of the things they might miss out on aren’t as easy to find anymore. My daughter (5) just started her second year at the same school, and so many of our friends from last year are attending different local schools. Even if people aren’t as drastic and spontaneous as we are with moving, they’re still able to choose differently, to try out a new school in their area rather than sticking with the same one just to keep their kids comfortable. Even when I was a kid, I switched schools several times and didn’t have a consistent group of friends until middle school. 

So I go back and forth, I feel this push and pull. I want to be normal one day, then fight against it the next day. It’s hard to decipher what I really want when there’s so much noise around me constantly telling me what I should want. Whether that noise is from people in my life giving advice, or the social media pull to “keep up with the influencers”. This can go the other way too — I’ve been awestruck by beautiful vintage campers and people writing or posting videos about traveling full-time with their families. It looks idyllic but we’ve traveled enough to know that isn’t reality. 

I spend a lot of time trying to unpack all of this and get to the root of what I actually want. One of the ways I’ve been doing that is through writing, which is what I’ll be doing here. I’ll be writing weekly about our first decade of roaming, cataloguing our adventures so that we can one day look back on them and remember all the hilarious things that “happened” to us, and hopefully it will be helpful or inspiring or at the very least, give some advice on what not to do. 

I’ve got about one year to get caught up before our next planned road trip! Thanks for following along!