THEY MAY HAVE BEEN POTATOES

Let the season begin!

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Last Friday, Michael drove the trailer over to Longview Lake campground which is about twenty minutes from our house. By the time I loaded up some dry goods and the dog and fought my way through traffic to meet him at the campground, he had already set everything up and was even lounging in his camp chair with a beer. All I had to do was hang up the camp lights. This is monumental because Michael and I have been discussing some things about traveling and the camper. We’ve been talking about Michael and the Cabbage driving out to where ever, California, the Grand Canyon, the East Coast, and then I would fly out to meet them. We spend a lot of time getting to the place where we really want to be. Then we don’t get to spend as much time as we would like in that place before we have to start back home. I have less vacation days. Michael and the Cabbage can take their time. Now we know that Michael can set the camper up all by himself. So…next year it looks like we’re headed to Washington!

We also discovered that potatoes do not last a year sealed up inside a plastic bin.

At least I think they were potatoes.

I got the utensil bin out so we could make ourselves some sandwiches that evening and everything inside that bin was covered in stinky mold. I threw the whole bin away. Do not worry. All of the titanium sporks are in the kitchen utensil drawer at home. Probably because I feared something like this would happen some day. No one knows how those potatoes got into that bin, especially since we don’t even store our food in that bin. But this is why we chose the closest campground to the house to set the camper up for the first time this season. This was the trip where we de-winterized the camper and took stock of the things we need and the things we need to replace and the things we’d like to have. Like a cooking prep table to set up next to the camp stove or some bus bins for washing dishes with the outside shower head. This was also our trip to discuss future trips.

We are not doing a big trip this year. Michael’s going to come with me when I go to a conference in Boston in July, but we do not have an epic camping family vacation planned for this summer. Instead, the plan is to take the camper to nearby state parks and have travel distances of no more than four hours. We had talked about taking the Cabbage to Omaha for a weekend, but the roads between here and there are under water. We are trading the Omaha Zoo for Silver Dollar City. Apparently teachers get in free and can purchase half-price tickets through the month of June. I have not been to that place since maybe 1998 and the more I think about it, the more excited I get about revisiting this particular childhood haunt. We were there so often that I had all the lines from the Saloon show memorized. I could play any part. I also knew the exact spot on the train ride when we’d get ‘robbed’ by the Bolins and where to stand or not stand during the Rainmaker show. If you were peckish, you could always grab a hot cracklin’ from the sample bowl at the craklin’ booth and giving Mom dipped candles that you made all by yourself was just like handing her a bouquet of wildflowers. We dipped so many candles.

Sure, the place is hokey. But it’s good ole family fun hokey. Maybe I can talk Michael and the Cabbage into getting an old timey family portrait made. Maybe that can be our Christmas card for this year!

Last summer we took the Cabbage on a tour of my childhood stomping grounds. She got to do all of the things that I got to do at her age. Except catch a fish. She did not catch a fish. She did get to run around various campgrounds with other kids in wild packs.. She did get to play in the dirt and climb up (and fall off) giant rocks. She got to see the stars and go for days without taking a bath. It seems almost fitting that we should be taking her to Silver Dollar City this year. I wonder if she’ll let me tie her hair up in pigtails like Mom used to do to me.

And then I can buy her bonnet to wear.

And dress her up like Laura Ingalls.

I’m probably going to have more fun than she will.

GOOD RELATIONSHIPS

Cow

Nine hundred and ninety eight miles. That’s the number of miles to get from Kansas City, MO to Oklahoma City, OK and then to Weatherford, OK and then to Duncan, OK and then to Norman, OK and then back to Kansas City, MO. And it was miles worth traveled. So much of my drive took me down two-lane highways with little signs of civilization for miles and miles. There was very little traffic and often, it seemed like it was just me, the prairie and the cows. If I felt like pulling off the road to take a picture, I just did it. I didn’t let myself worry about the delay it might cause and since I was all alone, I didn’t think about inconveniencing the driver with my request to stop. When I wasn’t stopping to take pictures of the vast landscape of nothing, I was building stories in my head. At one point I even thought up my own stand-up comedy act.

I met Stephanie for breakfast one morning and got all caught up on her life. I got to squeeze Robin’s new grand baby. I soaked in a hot tub. I ate hipster street tacos with Traci, Chris and Quinn (who is more obnoxious now than ever) and we laughed and laughed. I attended a college graduation at a small rural Oklahoma College where I listened to a speech that both surprised me and gave me hope. The young man spoke about his white male privilege and how he intends to use that privilege for social justice. He told his fellow graduates that it was not enough to have conversations on race, but to be active in the fight against racism. No one booed him off the stage, but applauded and cheered and I thought “maybe we’re going to be okay.” Maybe. I sat on the couch in Amy’s library office while she spilled her guts on the last few months of her crazy busy stressful life. I drank too much wine while sitting on Misti’s porch talking about ways to help college graduates prepare for all the possibilities available to them after undergrad. I told Mark something that I have not told anyone. He’s the only person right now who can hold me accountable.

As I made the long drive home on Sunday, I caught the tale end of the TED Radio Hour on NPR. Dr. Robert Waldinger was talking about what makes a meaningful life. Dr. Waldinger is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. His team and his predecessors have been tracking the health and lives of 724 men for 75 years. Actually the study has now moved on to the children of these men. It is the longest running study of its kind. One thing that has been made very clear from this study is the answer to the question of what makes a meaningful life and the answer is simple: “good relationships keep us happy and healthy.” Those relationships are not confined to marital relationships. Just having people in your life who you could count on in times of need, laugh with, cry with, is enough. These relationships keep us happy and healthy. It’s been proven by science that we need each other.

Yet, relationships for me can be difficult. I have always spent so much time alone, as a child, as a teen, in my adult life. I have to push myself to be in the presence of people, but I have never once regretted that push. Mostly because I feel like I’ve nurtured the best relationships with the best people. I am happier and healthier today for the weekend spent listening and laughing and commiserating and just being present in the company of all of them. Maybe Michael’s right about me and his prediction that I’m going to live to well past 100. Those good relationships will hopefully out weigh the bad genes and I’ll be the 90something old lady, doing yoga and zipping around town on a Vespa.

LEAVING ON A...LEAVING IN A TACOMA

Color

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Friday morning, Michael and I head out for this summer's road trip. (Sing it now!) The camper's packed. I'm ready to go. That's really the only part of the song that works, because there's not a jet plane and I am not lonesome. But I am ready to go. Sort of. There's the whole actually packing a bag of clothes that needs to happen. That should take up a good ten minutes of my evening. I have had some time this week to do some research on Atlas Obscura, a site Talaura turned me onto years ago. Now it has become a reference guide for every trip. I got a little excited about the possibilities ahead, like a Lincoln Totem Pole and maybe sneaking into an abandoned amusement park in Kentucky. There's also Dinosaur World, which is dog friendly and I think I'm going to drag us all to this place. There's a pterodactyl flying out of the opening and they've totally mimicked the Jurassic Park font for their website. 

Look... the largest ball of twine is a road side attraction made for people like me. I once paid a dollar to see the oldest Cyprus tree in the US. It was dead because it had been struck by lightening the year before. 

I will be posting pictures when I can, but I am also banking on not having decent cell signal. Michael has plans to teach me how to play backgammon. I have plans to look at a screen as little as possible. I have been spending too much time looking at a screen, doing nothing productive. If I get my iPad out, it will be to read a book or maybe color. I haven't done that in while. I've packed the small spirograph kit that Heather sent me and my yoga mat and I am looking forward to some stillness. Maybe even get to a place where my brain doesn't catch fire while holding some yoga poses for five minutes at a time. I am so excited about the adventures ahead!

So, consider this my Gone Fishin' sign. More like Gone Adventurin'. I'll be back eventually, hopefully with some new stories and most definitely with some new images.

VISION BORED

Making lazy circles in the sky

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap

Yes Chad, I meant bored not board. The other morning I was walking outside when I had a very clear vision. In the vision, I was riding my scooter down a back country road. There were saddle bags bulging at the sides of the scooter while I sported a hiker's kind of backpack on my back. Josephine's head stuck out the top of the pack and we were just traveling along the open road. It was such a clear vision that I started to wonder if it was actually possible. The idea of traveling across the US on the scooter seems very inviting. I would stop and photograph forgotten towns and abandoned road side attractions and camp out in yurts and teepees. Then I'd write a book about my adventures that would end up on the best seller list. The book would be so popular that it would made into a movie. Amy Poehler would play me in the movie; soundtrack by Neko Case.

I've done some math/calculations/guessing and I've figured out that I would need to take about a two year sabbatical from work in order to travel across the U.S. and write a book. This would give me six months or so to travel from one side of the country to the other and then back to the middle. It would look something like this.

Except it probably would not be so straight, particularly through that section between Charlotte and Boston because the scooter is not an amphibian scooter. At least I don't think it is. Also, the last time I went to New York, I flew from KCMO to Minneapolis and then to New York. I had never flown across Lake Michigan and somewhere in the middle I reached under my seat to be sure the life vest was still there. So I won't be barging the scooter across that lake. I feel that six months, give or take, is plenty of time for me explore the the winding roads of America. There's a lot of the North East I've never seen like Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh. I've never been to Montana or Idaho either. I could focus on the parts I haven't seen and zoom past the ones I have seen like that giant Ketchup bottle in Illinois. 

I figure I would need the rest of that time to write the book. I'd have to finish writing in at least a year so I could send it away to be edited by people who know how to edit. I feel that if it was my job to write the book, I'd actually write the dang book. The whole trip would make it so the book practically writes itself any way. There'd be pictures and probably a few lessons learned segments. I already envision a part where I try to change the back tire on my scooter. You have to remove the whole exhaust to get to that tire. I'm sure there would be a whole chapter of conversations with strangers. I'm a magnet for eccentric oddballs. It's like a bizarro superpower. I could also do on a whole chapter on food. A vegetarian in Montana. That's almost a book on it's own. 

It's all a pipe dream though, one to put on the list for when I retire. My work is great, but I don't think they'd agree to giving me two years off to go riding around on my scooter. Specially with pay. I'm also not so sure Michael would be all that cool with me taking a solo trip away for six months. I'm not so sure Josephine would be into riding on my back in backpack either. There's to much of a sense of responsibility in me to just drop this stable life for a vagabond life. There would be six months of my life where I wouldn't know what I was having for breakfast every day. Meal plans wouldn't exist. I would not be able to rely on a detailed schedule. The whole excursion would take me so far out of my comfort zone that I'd either adapt or turn right around and come home. Most likely I'd adapt because I'd be too stubborn to call it quits, but it's still a dream.

A freaking awesome dream.

LOVE THURSDAY

World's largest coal shovel. #365

"World's largest coal shovel. #365"

When I was a kid, my parents dragged me all over the south and western United States in a camp trailer. Dad wasn't the one to stop much for man-made roadside attractions, but we saw every cave and strange rock formation between Mississippi and Colorado. He was more of a nature-made roadside attraction guy. I can remember one weekend trip where Dad stopped the car and made me get out of the trailer so I could see a live armadillo. I was fifteen and it was the first time I'd seen a living breathing armadillo. Up until then I'd only ever seen them as roadkill. But Dad wasn't the type to stop and see the world's largest rubber band ball.

I, on the other hand, am a sucker for all things like the world's largest rubber band ball.  I paid a dollar once to see the oldest cypress tree in America. I wasn't even remotely disappointed when it turned out to not really be a living tree anymore because a weak earlier it had been struck by lightening. Sometimes I could convince Dad that we had to stop at something. For instance Aquarena Springs , home of Ralph the Swimming Pig. Steph was with us for that one. We did a glass bottom boat tour of the springs. Apparently, perch look a lot like piranha. At least enough that someone thought that this was the perfect location for filming the horror flick Piranha. I usually went with Randy and Katrina and J when they'd take J down to boy scout camp every summer. We always stopped at the Heavner Runestone and it was my favorite thing. It should be of no surprise that during our tour of the Dakotas, we stopped to see the World's Largest Buffalo and ride a giant Jackeloupe. 

The Cabbage spent this last weekend with Randy and Katrina and we met them in Joplin on Sunday to retrieve her and take her back to her mom's. We had some time to kill as we drove north on the highway. Michael looked up some roadside attractions on his phone and we both agreed that we had to see the World's Largest Coal Shovel! The giant morel mushroom can be seen from the highway. The coal shovel was off the beaten path a bit. Lordy, it was so cold, but we all got out of the car to inspect the giant shovel any way. I told the Cabbage "get in there so I can get a picture." She happily obliged. I thought maybe once inside the shovel, it wouldn't be so cold. The wind still managed to nip at our fingers and noses. Water had formed frozen puddles in the corners, trapping acorns and leaves. We didn't investigate the shovel for long. I didn't even read the panel next to it that told the story of the shovel. 

We've got a trip planned in June. We'll be meeting friends in Alabama for a week on the beach, our first vacation with the Cabbage. I've done very little research on area activities for where we will actually be staying. Instead I've been looking at the map and planning roadside attraction stops. I can see a whole photo album of the Cabbage standing next to the world's oldest shoe or the world's largest soup spoon. I see there's a giant fork in Springfield and a giant chicken statue on a car in Alabama. I'm sure it won't take much convincing to get Michael to stop at the scrap metal sports statues. Wait! I just discovered the Parachute Inn and Restaurant. This may have to happen. 

Hello. My name is Cindy Maddera and I am addicted to kooky roadside attractions. 

Happy Love Thursday!