Sue and I are heading at last in Gallivan for Austin, TX. We expect to be on the road for about three weeks, there and home again.
For me, the first day and night of a road trip are about breaking free from the familiar, which can be both anxiety-producing and exciting. On the one hand, traveling in a small RV has unusual risks, it takes one away from the safe routines and surroundings of home and creates new challenges. This is especially true if you have no day to day requisite destinations, if you can choose to go 350 miles or 100; if you can leave a planned route in order to explore something you only just discovered. Will one find a gas station when it’s needed? Have we planned enough to eat? Do we have sufficient propane? What if something breaks?
At least we can’t really get lost. Anywhere we end up will be somehow connected to where we want to be, and GPS is the traveler’s friend (along with cell phones, laptops, and other electronic marvels).
This trip, we will be traveling mostly on interstates, but we hope to get off on the other roads when we can. We’ll be passing through places we have never been, like Nashville and Louisville and Memphis. And Austin will be new to us both. We bought Gallivan just about a year ago, and this is our first opportunity for an extended road trip to unfamiliar places. This is the allure of travel. We don’t have to go where no one has gone before, just where we have never gone – or sometimes to places we have been to discover both old familiar places and new exotic ones.
Austin will be host, at the end of March, to Honk! Texas, a weekend of street music and general revelry. Dear friends of ours belong to an eccentric marching band called Extraordinary Rendition Band, from Providence, RI, which will be playing at the festival. Now we could of course see them anytime nearer home, but one shouldn’t too much of an excuse for a road trip.
Because Gallivan has all the comforts of home in a compact space (he’s a 21 foot Winnebago Travato G) we can be very flexible and frugal about our accommodations. Tonight we are staying in a road side rest are on 81 South just north of Harrisburg. Tomorrow we will decide about tomorrow.
I hope to be able to write about our travels every evening as a way of debriefing and unraveling from a day on the road. I promise not to let more than a day or two go by without some small update (just as I did six years ago in Travels With Myself.
Anyway, we’re getting settled in now, so goodnight until tomorrow.