The goal was to start our trip on Wednesday, June 21st but we seriously underestimated how much work is involved in selling a house, moving everything to a tiny house, closing up that tiny house for a year, saying goodbye to family and friends via dinners, etc., forwarding mail to responsible handlers, securing neighbors to keep the mice out of our house when the cold weather settles in, and, loading an RV for a one year trip around America visiting all the national parks. Whew! It’s tiring just writing about it!

Well, 6:35 PM on Wednesday, June 21st we hit the road, much later than expected but on the road nonetheless. Driving west from New Jersey, I thought I’d feel the enormity of embarking on a life changing trip like this but I actually felt like I was just leaving on a vacation. It was a little surreal, as if I didn’t realize what I was doing. There was a certain tinge of panic in realizing that I had given up my job and in essence was unemployed. There was a feeling of loss in leaving my co-workers and students at Pequannock High School. There was also a little bit of unknown sprinkled over everything since we hadn’t made reservations for anything. There wasn’t any question in my mind though that this was the right thing to do. Being able to do this trip and share the experience with my wife Laurie, was one of the few things that could justify giving up so much. The first night we parked and bedded down in a rest area. And then there was the sore butt that you get when you start driving 5-8 hours on the interstate. I felt somewhat “weighted down”. By the second day, things started to fall into place. We had left Jersey behind and were 200 miles into the Keystone State, finding our way down to the Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece, Fallingwater. It was a perfect metaphor for the Ecology portion of our trip since Wright designed this house to interact with nature and the environment, and Ecology is the interaction between species and their environment. The house is the perfect melding of form, function, creativity, mathematics, and nature.

From there we hit the road again and drove into Ohio. A great state Ohio, at least it is for pilgrims traveling in RV’s like us. Every other rest area on route 80 has a separate area where RV’s can park, hook up to electric, water, and utilize a dump station for waste. Nirvana! Showers, air conditioning, unlimited water! I know, we sound like a  couple of sissies, but, after 2 days on the road in the heat and the sweat, that shower was pure heaven. About this time, that old feeling of being on the road and not having any “obligations” weighing us down started coming back. I’ve traveled cross country several times before (in my younger days) and there is a great lifting of spirit that comes when your eyes are always “looking ahead” and, you’re blanketing yourself in nature. We arose in the morning renewed and eager to hit the road again. We spent about 5 hours arranging more belongings than our 24 foot RV could humanly hold and which had been alternately rolling across the floor or falling from overhead compartments for the past two days. It was also putting a major crimp in our ability to “live” in the RV. With the organizing almost complete, we hit the road and crossed Ohio and headed into Indiana where we suffered through hours of road construction backup but eventually made it to east of Chicago in Illinois by nightfall. We were able to secure an RV site in a trailer park that had a second job as a campsite but we had electricity and that made it worth it. We hit the road the next morning and as we reached the western edge of Illinois, we decided to stop at Starved Rock State Park in Seneca, Illinois. It was worth the stop as it gave us a break, allowed Jackson to get some exercise, allowed us to get out in some nature, and, to get off the road. The visitors center in the park had a section of an Elm tree that used to be one of the biggest Elms in the United States, that is until it was dropped by Dutch Elm disease which I believe was a fungus that came to this country via Japan. A similar fate befell the American Chestnut back east and across America, it too being wiped out by a blight that I believe also came from Asia. I also learned that the name “Winnebago”, (which is the manufacturer of our RV), means “people from the stinking water”. Wow, I wonder who the marketing genius was who chose it for the name of an RV company. Luckily, very few people know this background information. The park was quite crowed with hikers and dogs but we were able to view some wildlife along the trails that included a four foot water snake in a stream; white pelicans on the Illinois River; a huge snapping turtle also in the river; and a number of beautiful wildflowers along the path. For me, I think the highlight were all the dogs since I must admit, I have quite the obsession with the four legged flea hotels. After a few hours in the park, we hit the road again and headed for Iowa where we again secured ourselves a spot in a nice campground. Tomorrow, we head for Moscow, Iowa where we will spend the night in the parking lot of HWH Industries and at 7:00AM on Monday, will have “levelers” installed in our Winnebago. For those of you who don’t know what levelers are, (which included me up until 6 months ago), they are pneumatic jacks that come down and level your RV when you are parked in an uneven campsite. It does things like prevents you from rolling out of bed in the night or water running out of your pot on the stove. Quite handy actually. I don’t want to get to far ahead of myself but the plan after Monday is to head west to South Dakota where we will actually enter our first National Park and that would be Badlands NP. Can’t wait.