The End of the Road

Five weeks ago, we left Pennsylvania with a truck, a 45-foot toy hauler and the cautious confidence of people who knew this was a big deal but trusted ourselves.

Now we're home.

The camper is parked. The truck is no longer our only means of transportation. And we've reached the end of the road.

This road.

And I'm not entirely sure what I expected this trip to be.

I knew we'd drive a lot. I knew we'd work. 

I did not expect batteries to become a thing.

I did not expect wind to become something we worried about.

I did not expect to develop strong opinions about sewer connections.

But that's the thing about this trip.

The stuff I thought would be the story wasn't the story.

We got good at changing the plan

We started out with a very defined plan of heading west, but also knowing things would change.

Our first stops were less about scenery and more about figuring out how to actually do this. We stayed at Harvest Hosts and realized how amazing they are. But we learned that we don't want to boondock for too many days in a row.

And we had to rearrange some stops.

We decided not to drive though Yellowstone. 

We decided not to drive the shorter route between Cody and Buffalo. 

We decided we needed another battery, even if it meant I had to babysit Battery Guy's kid.

No assumptions

At some point during the trip, “no assumptions” became the unofficial theme.

Because every time we thought we knew how something would go, the trip had other ideas.

Twice? Maybe three times we showed up to campgrounds with onsite dining that we planned on using for dinner, and the restaurants were closed.

We assumed campgrounds were big enough. Because they said they were. 

We assumed roads would be paved.

We assumed working remotely from the camper would be similar to working from home.

That one was adorable.

And don't even get me started on working from the truck.

Working on the road was probably the biggest experiment of the entire trip, and it taught me that “remote” and “portable” are not the same thing.

You can take your job with you.

But do you really want to?

Yellowstone was both exactly what we came for and not what we expected

We went to Yellowstone without much of a plan.

That sounds irresponsible until you realize that Yellowstone is the size of a small country and has enough roads, trails, wildlife, geology and attractions to fill several days. Maybe weeks.

We did get to see the Northern parts of it.

But then we learned about the 52 hairpin turns to get through the park to our next stop.

This became another lesson of the trip:

Just because you technically can do something doesn't mean you should.

Jason is a very good driver. He's a careful driver. Some would say to a fault. I give him trash sometimes.

But that man got me home today.

Intact.

So I trust his judgement.

And instead of dragging the entire rig through Yellowstone, we spent a lot more time in the truck.

We also had one of those wonderfully weird travel moments that you can't plan. Jason reconnected with his Montana cousin in Livingston after 35 years.

That was Yellowstone in a nutshell.

The hardest part wasn't the road

The part of the trip I struggled with most wasn't sitting in the truck, or the wind, or the battery, or figuring out how to get a 45-foot camper into places designed by people who can't measure.

It was working.

We had built this trip around a part-time remote-work schedule, PTO days and long weekends. That was supposed to make the trip possible.

And it did.

But it also changed the trip.

There were days when we could have gone farther into Yellowstone, but I needed to work.

There were places we didn't see because getting there would have meant spending even more time in the truck.

Eventually, we had to make the decision to turn east without seeing everything we wanted to see.

That was harder than I expected.

There is something super frustrating about being so close to something you've traveled across the country to experience and having to say, “Not this time.”

I don't have a profound lesson for that one.

Sometimes you just don't get to do everything.

And being disappointed about that doesn't mean the trip was a failure.

It just means I wanted more time.

The things I thought would matter didn't always matter

I thought Yellowstone would be THE memories.

It gave us some of them.

But I keep coming back to smaller things.

Fruit beer and perspective.

The weird little places we found along the way.

Figuring out how to live on the road.

Would I do it again?

Ask me this immediately after one of the longer driving days and you might get a different answer.

There were times I wondered why we decided do this.

But now that we're home, I'm glad we did.

It wasn't perfect.

It absolutely wasn't.

There were compromises. There were days when work won over sightseeing. There were places we skipped. There were mechanical (mostly sewer related) annoyances. 

There were moments when I was tired enough to think that the open road was a stupid, silly idea.

But there were also five weeks of waking up somewhere different.

And there was discovering that we could actually do this.

Hashtag high-performers.

What we learned

If I had to reduce five weeks of travel to a handful of lessons, they would probably be these:

Don't make too many assumptions.

The campground might be smaller than it looks. The cell service might disappear. The weather might change. The route that looked fine on a map might not be fine. 

Leave room for the unplanned stuff.

Some of our favorite memories weren't things we scheduled.

A big rig changes the definition of “convenient.”

We learned to think ahead. Fuel. Water. Dump stations. Turning radius. Ground clearance. Parking. Stick close to highways when you can.

Working from the road is possible, but it isn't free.

The tradeoff isn't just Wi-Fi. It's time. Flexibility. Energy. And sometimes choosing work over something you really wanted to see.

You don't have to see everything.

This one is the most bittersweet.

We didn't see all of Yellowstone.

We didn't do everything we talked about doing.

We didn't execute some perfect five-week western adventure.

We just took the trip we took.

Home again

The camper is parked. The trip is over.

Even though I have real toilets in my house, I keep trying to flush them with my foot, because that's what you do in a camper. 

It's going to take some reprogramming.

Somewhere in between Pennsylvania and Montana, I found a voice I haven't heard in a while.

It's this one.

It's my creative, and sometimes rambling, voice.

Thanks for listening.

But now, we're home.

And that's not a bad place to end.