Pathfinding

A journey begins

It's taken a few days to get to this. Today is the tenth day of what will likely be a very long camping trip. It's not the focus of this blog, but it's what I'm doing right now and I'll write about the interesting parts.

Some backstory: after many, many years (nearly forty) of family life where we vacationed often enough but never camped, in 2023 after my wife died I decided to give it a try. Part of my reason was to cultivate an activity I could share with my youngest son, still living with me at the time. After a few trips, including one long multi-week circuit through west Texas, we both discovered that he didn't care for camping all that much and moved on to other things.

But I discovered that I liked it, a lot! In the summer of that year I took a three-week solo trip to Colorado, an area I've long loved, and found that solo camping was a sweet spot for me. Starting in December 2023 I took a few short trips and many long ones, all on my own.

This year I had planned to make several more, first for three weeks to west Texas in February, then the month of May in Maine, then six weeks of late summer in Colorado, then November in west Texas.

The Maine and Colorado trips are still in the plans, but in early April my son and his family were flooded out of their Kentucky homestead, about 20 miles north of where I live. They relocated to my house to handle the initial crisis, and then figured out they would need to build a new house of their own. Somewhere in there it occurred to me that by filling in the gaps in my upcoming travels, and perhaps extending them, I could simply turn my house over to them for the duration.

So I moved up my planned departure a week and took my tent to Shenandoah NP, not far from where my oldest daughter and her fiance are remodeling an old farmhouse. We visited a few times, and then I came up to Acadia NP in Maine, where I'll be camping for four weeks at two separate campgrounds on opposite ends of the island. Then the plan is to make a beeline for the western states ... well, after stopping for a couple of days to tour Concord MA, a town that looms large in my imagination. The few weeks before my original Colorado trip will be spent in Wyoming, some of it near Yellowstone. Then it'll be Colorado and northern New Mexico through mid-August. At that point I'll have been away nearly four months.

And then? It depends largely on whether I'm still enjoying time on the road or have gotten sick of it. Assuming the former, since I'm already on that side of the country I may just extend my stay, visiting Utah and Arizona before heading for west Texas and then home. That would be seven months total away from home. Too much? Should I settle for four? I don't know. My latest grandchild will arrive at the end of June, and it would be nice to put my house at their disposal for a few more months. But we could also share, my room is waiting for me, and I'm not trying to be heroic by staying away.