This whole airstream adventure started when I was just a kid having a movie night with my mom. I loved the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. In this wonderful film, a caravan of Airstreams rolls through a small town and brings along joy, love and ultimately a beautiful life adventure. I don’t recall if I’d ever seen or noticed one before but there and then I decided I loved those shiny round trailers. I’ve since spent life cutting out little pictures of them to pin onto dream boards and getting all googly eyed when I see one on the road.
We love to camp. Our idea of a good time is to escape the noise and the hustle of the daily grind and to get into nature. But lets be real, tent camping with three kids is a lot of work. We spend almost as much time prepping, playing tetris to load all our stuff in the truck and setting up camp than we do actually camaping. Plus, I do love nature but I also love a comfy bed. One day our friends who also have 3 wild and free littles came to visit us in an adorable vintage trailer and we realized how much easier and more enjoyable it could be to have a camper.
I started looking for cute trailers just to have for camping and well….one thing led to another. The sale sites had Airstreams. Sure, they were 5 times more money than we wanted to spend and bigger and more of a project and, and ,and…and I always wanted one. Good news for me is that I have spent my life in sales and I can be persuasive. I don’t even recall exactly what pitch I came up with but 48 hours later we were driving hundreds of miles to northern Wyoming to buy Ramona. It was love at first sight. I’m not sure that Tom was as instantly awestruck as me but he loves me and I’m not sure how he would have told me no with that twinkle in my eye.
So then there was a trailer in our driveway and then all the possibilities and hopes and dreams started rolling around. Did I mention I have an issue with one thing leading to another? Tom and I have always wanted to travel and we’ve loved the thought of one day living on the road for a season. We all have things we’d like to do in life. We all make vision boards of pretty pictures cut out of magazines that we dream of doing. For most of us there is a disconnect somewhere between the things we want and the things we make a reality. Well, we’re about tired of that. As much as we love our life, our home and our work we get tired of working all the days to mostly pay bills. We get tired of watching our kids get bigger and bigger and waiting until the next vacation to take a break from daily routine. Time passes by and we realize we have one short season of life to be a young family and we are not willing to let it slip by without making the most of it. Even then, even when we feel fed up with the same old day in and out of life, we still needed to make that leap to do something about it.
One day my brother in law calls us up and says that him and his family want to buy an RV, sell the house and travel the country for a year. After Tom got off the phone I said, “So are we just going to let your little brother live your dream life while we watch it on instagram? We’re going to have to come too.” So, we’re all off on a grand life adventure. It feels big and a little scary but also exciting and free. My mom taught me one of my favorite lessons, that your world is what you make it. I have all intentions of making mine beautiful, after all we only have this one life.
