I am on an evening walk. A tradition resumed after years of dormancy, a time of day that reminded me of my father and the smell of a Texas metropolis dusk. A spring walk with the smell of wet dirt was far more novel than it had been on the other side of runaway global germs.  ​

An idea had been working it’s way up the ladder of my mind and finally reached the top rung when I was two blocks from my house. It was a single world: leave. ​

The loudest whisper I ever heard. ​

It elaborated: there’s so little you would be taking your family away from. You can just as easily video chat from somewhere with a horizon full of mountains. ​

Ah, but the logistics, said the devil on my shoulder. ​

This was the pivot point. Instead of turning right and heading home while silencing the no with a flick of my wrist, I turned left and kept walking. ​

OK, I bargained. How about something short? We know how to camp, let’s go somewhere for a few weeks instead of just one. It wouldn’t be just because of my wanderlust, your ennui, my desire to be anywhere but here. There’s this giant international circumstance that has nothing to do with the voice that had been screaming at me to leave for years but I strangled every chance I got. Left its body at the altar of practicality, right next to the grocery lists. ​

Ninety percent of those considerations were gone as there was no school, no play dates, no office. As I stepped off a curb moving in a direction away from my house, something both loosened and wound tightly in my stomach. This was a force of urgency that I had only experienced twice in my life. The need to do a thing and do it right fucking now almost tripped me. By the time I crossed the street and stepped onto the sidewalk up the curb, it was no longer whether I should do this. It was how. ​

Half an hour later I walked in the backdoor. The broken threshold crunched under my feet as it had for the last handful of years. But instead of mentally adding that item, the need to fix it, and the associated guilt to my list of inadequacies, I opened my mouth and said to my partner, “Let’s take a trip.”​

OK, he said. He turned away from his video game, clearly not expecting this on a Wednesday night. Or was it Monday. “Where?” ​

“Out west,” I said, without really answering. “What if we got an RV? Went out for awhile? A few weeks maybe?” ​

Perhaps spurred by the energy radiating from my, perhaps by his love of shopping online, he promptly turned back to the computer and opened a browser. "What kind do we want?” ​

All the urgency, and the need could have died right there. But it didn’t. I would not have had the strength to combat difficult objections, but he didn’t bat an eyelash. I left him to his research and went upstairs to put my five and six year old sons to bed. ​

We left two months later. Away We Go had begun.​

What followed were campfire stories and images captured from our time on the road. It was a series of vignettes on the things I failed to notice while on the freeway of conventional life. A slow recognition of small things that turn out to be the big ones in parenting and camping and living.

These stories are in the process of being transformed into publication. For more, or to inquire about them, please contact me or sign up for the newsletter below.