Monthly Archives July 2015

Coming home, leaving some things, moving on.

It was a little strange rolling back into Northern VA after having been on the road for so long. Everything’s sort of the same, but it feels different. We parked the RV in my coworkers driveway and continued our life just like it was the days before. The stop wasn’t all great for the family, while we were here we lost two members of the family. Laurel’s grandmother had been in failing health for a while and we knew that we had to get back to see her one last time. At one month over her 100th birthday she passed away. She was a great woman who led her family with respect and intelligence and we will miss her.

In a tragic turn of events, our dog Baby also passed while we were home in VA...

We got the local tour because we were staying in town for longer than a month. We parked the RV behind a double wide meth lab and moved into the in-laws place for a week. It’s a different town when you’re not just going to the brew pub on Friday, wine and jazz on Saturday and driving home on Sunday. There’s more to WV than drinking! but it’s still a big part of it!

We drove from Memphis up through some beautiful countryside. Over a few rushing rivers until the land became flatter and flatter. We were heading for Illinois.

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Finally out of California! If you don’t count Guatemala and Mexico, We had spent almost 6 months in California. But the state is pretty huge and the cities are very different. But now it was time to visit Nadine and Daryl and my cousin John in the city of Sin. But Laurel had to fly back to LA for a conference and she decided to also fly back to Virginia to visit her 100 year old grandmother. So that left me alone in Vegas for a lot of the time. John was still working nights at a restaurant, so our schedules didn’t overlap much. So I spent most of the time exploring by myself. I played a lot of disc golf, hiked, rode my new bike around, ate ceviche, hung out at the pool, and spent almost zero time gambling.

Meadview is a tiny town near the west rim of the grand canyon. If you can imagine the town from the movie Tremors and the people from that movie. It’s exactly this. No trees taller than a cactus. On the map it looks like there’s a lot of roads, but in reality you can just see forever with little homesteads dotting the landscape. I don’t know why (or how) anyone lives out here. But I kind of loved it. We took SO MANY PICTURES! We decided that we needed a real vacation so we took off on Thursday and really just enjoyed looking at the views.

We just went down to San Diego for 2 weeks, then it was back to LA. Laurel had a conference for her work and we bounced around the area for a while. By this point we were really getting comfortable in LA. It’s a pretty nice town if you don’t have to fight the traffic.