There are a ton of updates – and honestly I am not sure where to start..

Since our last post we have been from Louisiana to Chicago to…well, now Maine.
There has been a lot to report on. The state of the world is interesting and although Emily and I thought we would be avoiding almost all of it – it turns out, we can’t. Every single part of this adventure has to be planned out in advance. In case some of you reading this don’t know me (Tara) very well, I don’t like to plan out adventures. I like to go wherever the wind may take me, follow random people to cool basins in the middle of nowhere, stop over in the middle of a forest and go explore, finding moments of little nothingness turning into grand adventures – those are what my life is about. Emily, not so much. My wonderful wife is the planner, the one that loves an itinerary and to know when she is eating her three meals a day, while I could grab a slim jim and be set for the day. The only thing that has tied me down to a semi ‘schedule’ has been the pups and kittens. They need to eat, be walked, played with and all of the things.
But for me, I wanted and begged for the instability of what the heck we would be doing. We are getting up almost every single day and moving locations, sometimes even driving for 4-6 hours away because that was where the next place would be. And guess what might have happened after a couple weeks of that….?

Well – we fought.
Emily and I are not real fighters. We disagree, we accidentally hurt each other the way people do, but as a couple – we don’t fight. It feels like the most unnatural thing for us to do, and even when we do argue and it can’t get resolved that night – we still snuggle. And I mean some hard snuggling, because we need each other even when we don’t like the other.
But during the constant go-go-go and the up down of setting up and breaking down and moving all of the many pieces from the car to the camper then back to the car, transporting of animals to and from the camper and car, how hungry are we and do we need to eat and is that the real reason why we (Emily) are getting frustrated.. So many parts to this moving carnival of chaos. We never knew if where we were staying was a reasonable place to set up shop for a few days or if we were just going to fall asleep for a night. Emily took a lot of the work. As much as I tried, I didn’t always know what to do or how to do it. Or I would try to do as much as I thought was OK and then I would shut down. I don’t mean being tired. I’m talking about an encompassing mind, body, soul shut down. I have been in therapy for a few months now, working on embracing myself and finding forgiveness for people who have and continuously hurt me – and it is exhausting stuff. Redefining the words I use and which angle to approach situations has completely taken everything from me. Before it became excruciatingly tiresome – it was trying, but manageable, mainly because I continued to work eighty hour weeks. I didn’t have time to sit and be with myself, and frankly – I didn’t want it. So, what does any sane human being do when they are shoved into this predicament? Buy a camper and be alone with my wife and myself. The first two weeks of this has been tough – because each time I shut down, I was checking out of the work, the relationship. I would fall into my old habits of distracting myself from my real feelings.
And Emily?
Emily was trying to work on us, having the opportunity to reconnect and focus on our marriage. That was one of our objectives for this, us. And I couldn’t participate. I could barely stand to think within my own head, and she wanted to be raw and intimate experiencing newness in each other.
Well, as you can guess there was some — tension!
Nothing earth shattering, but like I mentioned that isn’t really how we operate our marriage.
So many arguments kept coming back out, unresolved and finding cracks in our communication.
By the time we made it to Vermont, we were finding why we weren’t connecting and miscommunication. We were having the deep conversatons, the ones about how we view ourselves in and out of what makes our life work. And then we got to Maine. Florence was out of commission and we were forced to slow down and breathe. We were frustrated and cranky and coming up with literally every single situation that could make it worse for us and how we would navigate forward. Then we remembered that we need to feel normal again, or what normal felt like to us. We explored cities, went window shopping because basically everything is closed. We had a wonderful dinner, just us – no animals, no setting up or getting crammed into a small camper with no ac. We ate, and smiled, and flirted. It sounds so silly to say, but we actually took a moment to just be, nothing was weighing on us.

Having to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no resources but each other to depend upon, was a small miracle we needed. A lot of people have asked how we are doing this trip – money, resources, etc. Well, yall we saved up some – nothing extravagant but we knew how much we would be living off of and what we were going to spend and even had a small bit saved away for hiccups like Maine.
We picked up Florence today.
On Thursday we ended up without a tire on our camper. On Friday we found a towing company to go all the way out where Florence was and bring it to somewhere else we had to research to hopefully see if someone could repair it. Florence didn’t get to the Rv place until late in the afternoon on Friday. And here we are at Saturday, and at nine this morning the Rv place called to tell us they had been able to fix the problem and Florence was ready for pick up. Blessed doesn’t even begin to describe what it has been like. We found amazing people that helped us. Maine has been crazy so far, but the people here are out of this world!

The best part about this hiccup as unplanned and unwanted as you can imagine – we got to be normal again, we got to take hot showers, and sleep in a cold room where we could snuggle. The dogs and cats got a chance to play and get back to some sense of home.
And we figured out that we need a PLAN, a schedule, a way to navigate through. This pandemic has closed a lot of places we could stay, making it more difficult to just be. We can’t stay at some Rv parks because we don’t have a shower and toilet in Florence and they don’t have public access, yet. Staying in state parks used to be easy, you roll in and pay for a place and stay – not anymore. Now you have to schedule the place 24 hours in advance, well that would require us to know where we would be that day. So we sat down, highlighted all the things we wanted to do and created a roadmap of what our plans look like.

It has only been about a week and a half of this new planning life of mine, but no more fights. No more hurt, no more shut downs. I have this amazing opportunity to find myself again and love her with every fiber of my being. I have the chance of a lifetime to create meaningful memories and intimate moments with my wife and find where our communication fails so that we practice patience. We are lucky. We are beyond blessed. And you better believe we our thankful.

Peace.