Our Life on Wheels: Redwoods

This post is actually Chapter 1 of a book we started to write a few years back. Since we aren't making any progress on that book, we thought we'd share this little part of it with our Blogland buddies. We've updated it a little bit, as we would if we were back to writing the book.

It’s amazing that Suzy ever went camping with me again after that first experience as a young bride, yet here we are 50 years later, still RVing, and full timers at that.

We had borrowed my parents’ old canvas nine-by-nine umbrella tent and taken off for California’s Big Basin State Park to spend a week camping in the redwoods. Although my family had camped together since dirt was new, Suzy had never been closer to nature than a country mile. To make it more exciting, she was eight months pregnant and was, in the biblical phrase, “great with child.”

All redwood photos taken years later along the Northern California Coast.

We had sleeping bags and air mattresses. Of course, only one mattress went flat in the night: Suzy’s. Like the fabled Princess and the Pea, she felt every piece of gravel as though it were a rock, and the small rocks as if they were boulders. Although we traded air mattresses nightly, it was always hers that deflated while I blissfully slept on. About 2:30 Wednesday morning the wind arose in the redwoods. It sounded to me like a hurricane and I knew that these trees, these leviathans which had stood in place since the time of Christ, would likely come crashing down upon us that very night. In my exaggerated sense of responsibility for my burgeoning family I panicked. I dragged Suzy from her hard, unyielding bed and threw her, along with the dew-dampened tent, the Coleman stove, our sleeping bags and other paraphernalia, into the car and sped homeward through the dark and stormy night.

The following summer we camped again, this time in Yosemite National Park, with a nine-month old daughter along for the ride. Today’s child protection authorities would have blanched at the arrangement: we had taken one of those folding aluminum framed baby carriers that hung on hooks over the front seat of a car and attached it to my brother’s home-made wooden pack frame. For sun protection we attached the shade from an old baby stroller. As we hiked Yosemite Valley and the high country, our Debbie and her backpack throne attracted a lot of attention. Remember: this was 47 years ago, before many of today’s commercially available comforts had been invented.

Since those days, we have camped and RVed our way around much of the United States, into Canada and Mexico by tent, tent trailer, travel trailer, pickup camper, van conversion and finally by motorhome.

22-foot travel trailer, Superstition Mountains, Arizona

During our first full year of full-timing we were stuck in vacation mode, trying to see everything everywhere. We rallied ourselves to a frazzle with three major rallies. We logged 11,391 miles in the motorhome plus another 12,070 miles in the little green car we towed behind. We spent one or more nights in 59 different RV parks, two RV dealers' parking lots, one chair manufacturer's parking lot, two Elks lodge parking lots, on a friend's lawn in Arizona, and at both of our daughters' homes. We found ourselves camped in 18 states, 14 of which we'd never seen before.

We've eaten Creole in Louisiana, pasties in Michigan, Russian in Kansas, Amish in Iowa, cheese in Wisconsin, grits in Mississippi, and "original" barbecue in at least four states. Suzy learned how to cook jambalaya. We boat-toured the Atchafalaya swamp in Louisiana and the upper and lower Dells in Wisconsin. We became friends with a man who was decorating the outside of his motorhome with illustrations from Alice in Wonderland.