Friday, October 2, 2009

Strange


It's taken quite a while, up until the last week or so, but I have finally stopped comparing life in our house to life on the road. I'm more used to the way the plumbing works in our RV than I am in our house. I'm sure by the time we get home it will take a few days before I stop looking for a dump station, or forget about filling up with water.
The differences are many and they are also great.
Obviously there is a huge difference in space. I can sit at the table in the RV and reach just about anything in the kitchen. That is convenient and confining at the same time. In Abby's bed you had better not jump up, because the ceiling is only two feet from the mattress. Showers are short or you run out of water, and the bathroom isn't exactly cavernous. You give up the space inside, because you gain so much outside.
When we hit one hundred days on the road, it meant that in total, we had spent 104 days living in the RV. Our pre-trip test run was a short one. Even though it answered a lot of questions for us about whether we could handle it, it was too short to answer everything.
Can I say that the tight space never gets to me? No. Can I say that it is completely worth the sacrifice in square footage? Yes.
The thing about this trip that will be the hardest to adjust to when we return home, will be waking up to the same scenery everyday. Granted many of the days we wake up there is nothing to see but pavement and parked cars, but I know that I'm just a few miles away from something I've never seen before.
I've become enamored with being a stranger. I enjoy not being a local. Sometimes the only difference between something exotic and something mundane is familiarity. Right now, in this moment of my life I'm enjoying the unfamiliar, the foreign and the strange. The World's Largest Ball of Twine comes to mind.
For the people of Darwin the ball is no longer the show, it's the parade of goofs like me that drag their families there to see it. They don't sit at Jack Tavern, across the street from the Twine Ball Inn, and talk about the ball. They talk about the guy in the Ohio State hat driving a campa pullin a campa that made his disinterested kids stand in front of the ball too long and take pictures. It's the foreign or strange that attracts your attention.

So now that I'm used to living in a smaller space and spending more time looking out a windshield than at a TV screen, it might be difficult to go back. Then again, maybe after 48 states my wanderlust will be satisfied. When the trip ends, I can bring back all the foreign things to my familiar space.

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