On the road again...

January 16, 2018 by Galia in on the road, new orleans

San Diego to New Orleans in seven days:

Day 1:

Pack up the RV, long hugs, tearful goodbyes, hit the road
Land outside Flagstaff, AZ, at the Meteor Crater RV Park
First time camping in below-freezing temperatures! Have no idea what to do with that. Put antifreeze in the gray and black tanks, leave the tank heaters on, and don't put fresh water in the fresh water pipes. And crank the heat up, because Galia gets cold if it's less than 72.
Learn to appreciate RV parks with nice bathrooms.

Day 2:

Seriously, these bathrooms are nice.
Discover that our hubcaps were stolen. Seriously? Who steals hubcaps? Find most recent picture taken of the RV, realize they could have been stolen any time in the last month. C'est la vie!
Side trip to see the giant meteor crater! It was very big and cratery.
Drive to Santa Fe, NM, pick up my friend, Desiree, from work (in our RV!). Head to her house and meet her partner, Tiffany. Realize that Desi and I haven't seen each other for five or six years, which is a bummer, but also reaffirms my previous knowledge that I could go any amount of time without seeing Desi and it would feel like we'd seen each other the day before. We had a brilliant time with them both; they're such open, interesting, and reflective people that you feel like you can ask them any questions, and they can ask you any question, so you can get right to the meat of the interesting stuff. Mike immediately understood why these people are My People! Mike and I also learned that we can still achieve our goal of deep meaningful connection even if our stay is short. Deepest thanks to Des and Tiffany for opening up their home to us on a random Tuesday night, and right after they had previous guests leave, too! Obligatory New Mexico Mexican food (chile sauce on everything!), excellent conversation, and interesting stories made for a wonderful evening.

Day 3:

Oatmeal and coffee with Des before she goes to work
More driving! Head to Oklahoma.
Start running out of gas. Next gas station isn't for 25 miles; the following one is ten miles after that. Anxiously make it and pull in; the gas pumps are down. After some commotion, discover that at least the diesel is working, so we won't have to find out the hard way what happens when a giant RV runs out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
Long driving day with nothing much to look at. Getting exhausted. Learning that more than a couple days of driving in a row can be rough, and these 8+ hour days are pretty difficult.
Somewhere around here is when I start to realize that, while it's perfectly possible to work on the road, I simply just don't want to. I'd rather sit and watch the scenery (even if there isn't much to see) and hang out with Mike than be responding to emails. I do some work this week to stay on top of things, but finally admit to myself that I should probably just plan to not work on travel days. Luckily, there will be few times this year where we'll have as many in a row as this week.
But do learn how nice it is to be able to get takeout food and then eat it in your portable house instead of inside a fast food joint or gas station.
Make it to Oklahoma City; neither of us had been to Oklahoma before. It was so cold that the electric heater shut itself off in the middle of the night to protect itself from breaking. (That was a feature we were as yet unaware of.) We were low on propane, but luckily had enough to turn the propane heater on instead to get us through till the morning.

Day 4:

Spend a few hours exploring Oklahoma City. Yummy breakfast at a place called Hatch, then a cold but pleasant walk around town. Visit the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, warm up inside a beautiful big skyscraper, walk around a nice garden park, and check out the canal at Bricktown. Can't quite get a good read on OKC; seems like they're working really hard on redevelopment and revitalizing the city, but you still can feel the undercurrent of the people and places that they seem to be trying to erase over. Like any gentrifying town, this stress felt a bit uncomfortable to us as we appreciated the new but could still feel the old.
Fill up the propane, so we won't have to worry about the heat again!
Drive to Austin, with a stop for Galia's first-ever meal at Cracker Barrel.

Day 5:

Austin! A day of recommendations from my BFF, Earnest:
Late lunch at Magnolia Grill, walk around that neighborhood and see the iconic Welcome to Austin mural.
Get a Fat Elvis donut at Gourdoughs (with peanut butter icing, topped with grilled bananas and bacon).
Find a place to store the RV in New Orleans, but the owners say we have to send the paperwork in within an hour, so we go back to the RV park and Mike sends the paperwork while I take a post-sugar-rush power nap.
Back to downtown Austin. Look for a recommended coffee shop but it's not there anymore, so grab caffeine at a coffee shop that's inside a giant bike shop, make jokes about hipster towns.
See the capitol building, walk a few blocks down Sixth Street, walk to the water, then down Rainey Street (which I adored).
Lyft across the river, check out the view from this cute spiral hill, then get really yummy bbq at Terry Black's, followed by frozen custard at Sandy's. Pick up Tiny Pies to go, and head home.
Really nice to have a day off of driving just to hang out and have fun. I love Austin. If it were closer to anything/anybody else that I loved, I'd consider moving here.
Note: We are in the South now. Most of our pictures will be of food.

Day 6:

Since we have no fresh water in the RV due to low temperatures, we have to shower at the RV park showers. We made sure to book parks with super nice bathrooms, but the only issue in Austin was that the bathroom was really far away. This morning, I bundled up (it was still really cold), walked all the way there, unpacked all my toiletries and whatnot, and then realized I didn't bring a towel with me. Powered on anyway; used shirt to dry off. Laziness breeds innovation.
Drive south, with a stop in Katy for surprisingly delicious gyros from a restaurant attached to a gas station.
Meet up with Mike's sister, all get groceries and coffee. Her friends come over and we all hang out, order pizza.
Also, since we're comfy and with family, take the opportunity to do laundry and dishes!
Sleep in the RV in the driveway so she doesn't have to do our sheets. Reinforces how convenient this thing is.

Day 7:

Eat cereal all together, then have to take off and say goodbye.
Drive to Louisiana, with a stop in Scott to pick up boudin at Don's, at the request of our AirBnB host. (I love the people here.) Mike is in Meat Heaven; we walk out with boudin, a stuffed chicken, fresh beef jerky, and literally a pound of freshly fried pork skins. Welcome to Louisiana.
Make it to New Orleans. It's hard enough driving around New Orleans with a normal car -- you never know when you'll discover a huge pothole, downed electrical wire, or overgrown tree. But in an RV, it was downright traumatic. Every other street had a No Trucks sign, which we assumed to mean Do Not Enter If You're an RV Either Because We're Too Lazy to Trim These Trees in Particular, so we spent a really long time trying to find a way across town that wouldn't somehow end with property damage. But we made it!
We ended up renting a house here for our six week stay, because the only RV park that was right in town was literally more expensive, and since we won't have a car to get around, we felt it was important to have a place in town to stay so we can use the bus. As soon as we got here, I knew the decision was a good one -- the house is adorable, comfortable, an absolutely perfect location, and has plenty of space for us to settle in to life and work.
We unpacked the RV, and then took our second perilous journey back out of town to drop it off at an RV park in Belle Chasse. Jokingly reflect how little we're staying in our RV on this RV trip.
Back to the house, order in piles of fried food, including the largest pile of fried pickles I've ever seen. New Orleans, I'm happy to see you again.
Since then, we've been taking the opportunity to settle in, explore our neighborhood, and catch up on work (Galia) and rest (Mike). One really awesome thing about being in a town for such a long time is that you can take your time, explore the details, feel like you really live there, and not like you have to cram in every single meal and activity into a few days.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash — Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

A year of warm hellos; a year of sad goodbyes.

January 07, 2018 by Galia in san diego, on the road

After six weeks at my parents' house in Oceanside, we packed up the RV and hit the road again.

In some ways, it feels like a new beginning to the trip. We were very, very comfortable there in every way. Physically comfortable, because they were incredibly kind and made space for us to settle in. But also emotionally comfortable. We all bonded so much that we could really, truly be ourselves and just relax and enjoy each other's company. We were just a little family, living our lives together. I enjoyed it more than I think I could describe here, and it was really nourishing and rewarding. It was also really nice to see Mike bond with my parents so much, to the point that, when I was in Orlando and he was there without me, I'd call to say hi and he'd pick up, "Hi! I'm at the Cheesecake Factory with your parents!" Makes me happy.

We were all surprised, I think, by how hard it was to say goodbye. Dad said it felt similar to taking your kid to college for the first time -- like you're releasing them out into the world on their own. I'd grown so accustomed to having them in my day to day life that it made me tear up thinking about being apart again.

Lessons learned from the first leg:

It's working. The point of this trip was to integrate into people's lives seamlessly enough to create the intimacy that can only come from longer lengths of time together. Things like having a common TV show you watch every week, cooking dinner together, going grocery shopping together, doing the dishes, and saying, "I'm bored! Wanna do something?" We felt completely at home at my parents' house, and they tell us that it felt just as comfortable on their end, too. I'm closer with my parents than I've ever been, and Mike feels fully a part of the family. I don't think this could have been possible in a shorter period of time, without perhaps just living in the same town as someone. This solidly reaffirms for us what we're doing here -- creating intimacy in our lives with the people we love, and we're doing it successfully. This trip is already worth it. It also makes us incredibly excited for our future stops, knowing that it's totally possible to recreate with everyone else along the way.
For every hello, there's a goodbye. This one we didn't realize until we were pulling away from my parents' house with tears in our eyes. The closer you get with people, the harder it is to say goodbye. So the more we succeed in creating unbreakable bonds with people, the more it'll hurt to move on. It wasn't purely sad, of course -- our sadness was tempered by excitement to keep going and do it all over again -- but the difficulty was unanticipated. But, in the wise words of Winnie the Pooh, how lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard!
It'll never feel like enough time. We originally planned four weeks in San Diego, and ended up extending to six because of all the side trips and busy-ness. I don't think we could have achieved what we achieved in less than four weeks, and even six didn't feel like enough time. Planning travel days is also tough, because we constantly have to juggle the equally pressing priorities of a) maximizing time with our loved ones (which would imply rushing from place to place where we know people), b) sight seeing so we don't fee like we're missing seeing the country as we go (which would mean removing potential hangout time with our friends and family), and c) making sure there's time to work and do Responsible Adult Stuff. Mostly, we just constantly feel like we're doing none of the three as much as we want to. We're almost two months into our trip, and we can already tell that a year won't feel like enough, and each stop will feel too short.
We want to keep going. Part of the reason we're doing this trip now is because we're approaching Settle Down age. We wanted to have our adventure so if we choose to settle down somewhere, we'll get it out of our system and feel ready, or at least feel like we're not missing out on other things we hadn't done yet. This might change by the end of the year, but so far, all it's doing is make us want to do this even more. We spend driving time daydreaming about our possible future lives. Maybe we can spend three months a year in SF, three months in Findlay, three months in Orlando, and three months in NOLA every year! Maybe we can spend six months a year with your family and six months a year with my family! Maybe we should rent an RV in Europe and do the next year doing a trip over there! Maybe we can live in a different country every three months! The things we do know for sure are: 1) being near family is becoming increasingly important to us, especially if we do end up having kids; 2) for now, we want to keep adventuring, and want some sort of mobility built into our lives; and 3) how incredibly grateful and lucky we both are to have found a partner who is willing (and excited) to keep our minds open about all of the future possibilities in life, and being okay with not planning for now, and knowing that we might change as we go and to be okay with that change. It's a thrilling life adventure together.
We're learning more about each other, but not in the ways we expected. You'd think that the reason you'd get to know someone better is just by being with them 24/7, but the truth we're discovering is, closeness comes from experiences, not from time. (Obviously, you need enough time together to have shared experiences, but time itself doesn't necessarily do it.) If we were spending all of our time together but not meeting new people or doing new things, we'd end up just saying the things we usually say and doing the things we usually do. You frankly just don't think to ask certain questions otherwise, not because you don't care, but because it's just never come up. And this is from a couple who spends most of our time just talking to each other. When you spend time with other people, they think to ask the questions you haven't, or conversations come up that wouldn't have otherwise. Our lives are also changing on a daily basis, so we're often finding ourselves in situations we wouldn't have experienced otherwise, which also lets you learn more about the other person. So not only are we creating intimacy with the people we're visiting, but we're getting to know each other on levels I don't know if we ever would have otherwise (or at least, not this quickly). Lucky for me, I'm on this trip with my favorite person in the world!

San Diego, final chapter

January 05, 2018 by Galia in san diego

Our last couple weeks in San Diego were a whirlwind, but a fun one!

My brother's family was in town at my parents' house before Christmas, which was a windfall for us -- normally we only get to see them a few times a year, so we got bonus time before we see them in Atlanta! The downside was that everyone got super sick, so the adventuring was at a minimum and there was a fair amount of napping, self pity, and racing to the nearest tissue box. But sick or not, I was grateful for the time. (Sidenote since everyone I know seems to be sick right now: did you guys know there's a such thing as a travel humidifier? We got one when we were sick, and now we can bring it with us everywhere. Handy.)

Then I went to Findlay, Ohio to see Mike's family for Christmas. He had already been there for two days. It was jam-packed with family time, and was a real blast. My only wish is always to be able to spend more one-on-one or small group time with each person, so we can really get to know each other. So I felt really grateful, knowing that this trip would give us that exact opportunity.

We flew back to San Diego, and had four days until departure. We spent a day at the San Diego Zoo with my parents. Then on New Years Eve, my aunt joined us all for Indian brunch and a movie. Then we went home and did a Miracle Fruit taster buffet! If you're not familiar with miracle berries, they're a berry (more easily taken in tablet form) that bind with your taste buds in a way that removes bitter and sour flavors from food, so things taste really sweet (even super sour stuff that you can't normal eat straight). My parents hadn't done it before, so we set up a whole table of a bunch of fruit (lemons, limes, and grapefruits were the major crowd pleasers), salt & vinegar chips, pickles, cheese products, and more, and had a sweet feast. When we were done, we went to go watch the ball drop. We decided to celebrate Eastern Time New Years instead so we wouldn't have to stay up till midnight, but at around 9:02, we confusedly realized that the ball hadn't dropped -- the channel we were watching was on a three hour delay to line up to Pacific Time midnight. Whoops!

Other highlights from the past few weeks:

Doing VR with my brother and sister in law
Trying a bath bomb for the first time (so fizzy and blue)
My one-year-old nephew's first trip to our family Mexican place, Anita's (which my parents have been going to since before my brother, his father, was born)
Mike's dad made a little fort for me in his shop so I could drink coffee and read my book while watching the beautiful snow falling outside
Driving around Findlay with Mike's parents to look at Christmas lights and seeing Santa
The Christmas Eve walk down Findlay's luminary-lined Main Street
Watching Sound of Music for the first time, and enjoying Mike's mom's reactions to one of her favorite movies
Asking the guy next to me on the plane if he'd switch seats so Mike could sit next to me, and he said that he loves his wife but would never give up a Comfort Plus seat for her like Mike was doing for me
Accidentally wearing my slippers to the zoo and having to buy really expensive tourist flip flops

After our botched New Years countdown, Mike and I stayed up late packing up the RV. Next post: our goodbye to San Diego, and lessons learned from our first leg.