The Great Affair is to Move . . .
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.“ ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
The whole world has been on lock down, locked out of our favorite places, locked in with the same people for months and now it appears there’s no end in sight.
Real Estate sales are high, because when you’re locked in your home for an extended period of time, you really learn what you love and don’t love about it. As my nephew explained why he and his girlfriend moved, “We’ve spent so much time cooking and eating at home, we found we just couldn’t bear to do it in an apartment any longer. We needed a yard, or a garden, more outdoor space to spread out.”
Most of us are feeling claustrophobic and irritable—no summer vacations jetting off to foreign lands, no leaving the house to go to work, no evenings out to attend concerts or parties. If we don’t get out of the house, we’re staring at the walls, and each other.
Bike sales have gone through the roof, with more and more families taking to the open road together. Most bike stores can’t keep up the demand without a waiting list.
Airports and airplanes have become scary places for many of us but we can’t stay home, inside, forever. So there is an obvious solution, one we’ve been straying from in our quest to see the world—we need to see America first, and we need to drive while we’re doing it.
We recently got an RV and if you know my husband and I you know that we are not campers, except in the most esoteric sense. But it turns out we are not alone, by any means. Our sales person told us he sold more RV’s in the week we bought ours than in the entire year up to June. He said his lot was sold out and waiting to fill the orders coming in, just like bike shops.
A whole new world opens up when you can take your kitchen, bed and bathroom with you wherever you go.
For instance, did you know Texas boasts 80 state parks (with at least ten featuring some luscious water to keep things a bit cooler in the summer)? And, that’s just Texas–we’ve got so many other states and state parks, and it’s very easy to keep your ‘social distance’ in the Great Outdoors.
Then, there are the magical National parks, a gift to Americans from the Earth and Teddy Roosevelt.
I’m now a big fan of the ‘Chip and Johanna Gains’ of the RV camping world—Marc and Trish with their ‘Keep Your Daydream’ YouTube videos, newsletters and Amazon shopping page. They set out with three kids, two adults, and a dog to spend six months on the road visiting National parks.
Four years later they’re still at it and blogging about it.
They had the courage to ‘Come down off this feather bed of civilization’ and now, we have all discovered we need to do it as well.
Let’s travel for travel’s sake’.
Lets fall in love with America again–It feels glorious.
pinkchronicity 