Just a regular Friday evening camping in a vineyard.
On a Friday evening, boondocking in the middle of a vineyard while our kids used the last available light of the day turning sticks into swords and acting out an exaggerated storyline, Kelley and I sat together in the banquette of our new-to-us travel trailer, sipping on cabernet sauvignon in plastic cups from the winery down the hill, drafting Kelley’s letter of resignation on the laptop with what battery power we had left.
We were on the last leg home from a last-minute trip to South Dakota to purchase an RV, on a week that Kelley, exhausted and burnt out from his role as an essential worker throughout COVID, decided to take a mental health break. He’d worked through almost every lunch break since 2019, on-call 24/7, and his health had been paying the price for a while. We’d been discussing and praying through our next steps for several months, but it’s hard to have a productive discussion, let alone make wise decisions, when you’re essentially running on fumes. And we’d been dreaming of buying an RV for years, so when the opportunity came up to purchase one that was perfect for our family at a great price, we packed our bags and took a road trip.
We loaded up our three kids and our puppy, who now takes up almost a whole bench seat, in the back of our Ford Expedition, and headed east, the cloud cover clearing like the fog in our brains the farther away from Portland we drove. Well, I drove as Kelley slept off his stress load.
We met Gregg and Marsha a couple of days later at a credit union in Sioux Falls to buy their RV, a 2021 Grand Design Imagine 32-ft. travel trailer. She wore a denim skort and floral blouse, and he wore his military history in the brow lines on his face. They were of good stock and good natured, and after we signed the paperwork, we followed them back to their farm an hour and a half away for lunch.
Blue sky stretched for miles over rolling prairie grass and wind turbines out in the middle of nowhere. The wind was aggressive and unrelenting and made Gregg and Marsha’s home even more inviting, though their midwestern hospitality had drawn us in already.
Marsha presented the kids with camping flashlights and activity books that were sitting on the kitchen island, an early 20th Century Scandinavian carpenter’s workbench that had belonged to her family, and when I asked if the windmills in the distance were theirs, Gregg shook his head and said, “Those aren’t windmills; they’re wind turbines, and we fought to keep from having them installed. Unfortunately, we lost.” He then took Kelley into his office to hand him a signed copy of a book he had published about the hidden dangers of wind turbines. (This was surprising information to us, and I’ll never look at a wind turbine the same way again.)
We said grace around the table and chatted over a deliciously comforting meal of roast and vegetables, with fresh raspberries and vanilla ice cream for dessert, and the kids ran at full speed through the prairie while Gregg gave us a tutorial on the travel trailer. Marsha handed us a bag of homemade oatmeal cookies for the road and hugged us tightly before we finally pulled out of the driveway, cringing at every creak of the trailer hitch as we rolled cautiously down the long gravel road.
The next day we drove through the Badlands and parked for the night on a bluff overlooking the canyonlands, where we’d watched a coyote sprint across the grassland and a couple of bighorn sheep tiptoe on the rocky cliffs just a couple of hours earlier. As we made our way home, we blared the best of Billy Joel through our speakers and wound through the sagebrush-speckled rolling hills of Wyoming, chasing down the jagged snowcaps of the Rockies in the distance. We saluted Our Lady of the Rockies in Butte, Montana, and shared marionberry milkshakes in St. Regis (the best in the world, according to the billboards). And we breathed more deeply and slept more soundly than we had in a long time.
It’s been a little more than a month. One month since we told strangers-turned-friends in South Dakota what we were contemplating as our next steps. One month since we’d marveled at the Badlands and drifted to sleep by the song of coyotes in the canyons. One month since we sat in that vineyard, dreaming daring dreams and planning to step out into the unknown with all the courage we could muster.
And here we are today, once again selling most of our possessions and getting ready to move, only this time we’re moving into an RV to travel as a family. There are a few potential job opportunities in the works, with the possibility of remote work, so we have no idea how long we’ll have before starting a new life somewhere. For now, we’re going to savor every minute of our time together, where we have nothing to do but explore, rest, and have fun as a family. Ranger’s crate occupies most of our floor space in the RV, and we’ve already needed some repairs to both our vehicle and the travel trailer. We are eating our meals in camping chairs around a folding table and sleeping at night on mattresses resting on the floor because our furniture is selling quicker than our move-out date is approaching. But every challenge and discomfort we face is dripping with a richer joy and expectancy than we’ve ever experienced, and our hearts are clutching a faith like we’ve never had before.