Today is Sunday and Beth and I are on our way home.
Our Southwest Adventure ended today, almost exactly halfway across the country on the border between Illinois and Iowa.
Allow me to explain…
If you have been keeping up with this blog, you know that every time we were knocked down, we got up. This began over the winter when sciatica wouldn’t allow me to drive more than twenty minutes without discomfort. I visited chiropractors, PTs and pain specialists and never felt sufficiently better.
I worked on living with the intermittent pain by placing a tennis ball under my thigh, stopping frequently or asking Beth to split the driving. We talked about not going, but we decided to persevere.
After leaving our gigs in New Jersey, we stopped in Pennsylvania to get our hitch adjusted. This led to a four hour repair ($250) where the tech noticed we were leaking transmission fluid. This discovery necessitated a four night stay in a hotel ($700 in points) to wait for the parts to be delivered and a repair that cost us some more bucks ($650).
Should we call this trip a bust? No!
Still hopeful, we continued through Ohio to Indiana where we spent a morning at Camping World replacing a trailer battery and dealing with a lavatory that needed cleansing ($300). That afternoon, we stopped for four hours at Dan’s Hitches where the hitch experts attempted to fix our swaying camper one more time ($350).
Unfortunately, the next day we got on the highway and realized that the camper was still swaying too much and this was the easy part of the trip! Beth was scared of the Rockies. We were both angry at Ford, the people who sold us the camper and the hitch and ourselves for not being wiser. As a friend of mine said today, “You guys were understandably losing your trust.”
On Saturday, our 34th wedding anniversary, we paused and gave ourselves the gift of some time to reflect, to look at our options. We could either 1) go on as planned; 2) move forward without the camper (we found a place to store it in Illinois), shorten the trip, cancel all of our RV reservations and rent cabins and hotel rooms; or 3) go home.
We started talking. We took time to rest at a comfortable campsite. We slept on it. And we prayed for guidance. We even called up a bunch of the RV camps to assess financial penalties and discuss options with them. And we looked at our budget. We slept, we ate BBQ and we talked some more.
It was clear that we felt beat up and a bit broke, but we just couldn’t end this in defeat, right? We had to keep going, right?
One of Beth’s friends said (and I’m paraphrasing), “If you expect it to all be better from here on, you may be mistaken. If you’re looking to get better at dealing with adversity, keep going. If you want an enjoyable vacation – you might not get it if you’re already fried.”
We realized was this trip was no longer about seeing the Southwest. The journey was now about how a married couple learns how to wrestle with adversity and difficult decisions together. It had become about how to be honest and not brutal with one another. In truth, we were learning when it’s time to surrender, to lay down our swords and let go of winning at all costs. We were learning how to protect our mental health.
Surrender is exceedingly difficult in a culture that values stories where the hero or heroine never stops fighting until they’ve won.
What finally tipped the scale toward leaving was a letter Beth received from a fellow traveler who had gone through a similar, terribly challenging vacation one month ago. In that letter, Beth’s friend revealed that if she had the chance to do it all over again she would NOT have persevered when it was obvious that the odds were stacked against she and her very strong husband. She told Beth that it has taken her all of the last month for her nervous system to recover.
When we read that story, we felt our shoulders drop in relief. There was a path to letting go that didn’t mean failure
Folks, these are challenging times. We have all been living in a country where we are barraged on a daily basis by craziness. This has been going on for ten years. Our central nervous systems are overloaded.
There comes a time when we can choose to say, “ENOUGH!” That time was this morning for us. So, with some sadness and frustration, but also a lot of love, we headed east. We were fine with the adversity, right?
Stay tuned. The Adventure continues.
Playlist
Robert Reich’s Saturday Coffee Klatch, a rebroadcast of Will Ferrell on Smartless, Sufjan Stevens (Carrie & Lowell)
