The photo below shows a couple of RVs sunning themselves side-by-side in Malibu, California. There’s an RV park there, set a couple hundred feet above the waves. The view of the Pacific is sublime. But my point in showing the photo – taken almost exactly five years ago – is this: The company was even better.
For the past ten summers, Amy and I have had the luxury of piloting a house on wheels across the country – and our sons (ages 9 and 7) have traveled with us for all but the first one. But five years ago, we spent a month cruising through the Southwest during the winter. And we weren’t alone. Our good friends, who were then living in the Minneapolis area, joined us.
It was a perfect confluence of time, place and opportunity. Our friends Adam and Steph are the directors of Camp Nebagamon for Boys in northern Wisconsin. It’s a special place to all of us – in fact, it’s where Adam and I met more than 30 years ago. Every winter, Adam embarks on a camp reunion and recruiting tour, including stops in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas and Oklahoma City. When we realized that his tour and ours could coincide, we started hatching plans. At the time, our four sons (that is, two each) were all in pre-kindergarten. The time was perfect for a winter caravan.
We left from our house on California’s Monterey Peninsula on a sunny day in early February, made our way south to Malibu, stopped at Disneyland for a couple of days, enjoyed SeaWorld in San Diego, toured Joshua Tree National Park, visited Phoenix and Tucson, spent an afternoon marveling at White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico, hiked through Carlsbad Caverns, strolled through the Alamo and along the Riverwalk in San Antonio, and played at Space Center Houston before making a U-turn and steering ourselves back to the California coast.
We all got along famously, our four boys included, over the course of the month-long caravan. And we saw some remarkable sights – made all the more memorable by the fact that we got to share the experience with close friends. Adam had brought along a couple of walkie-talkies – one for each RV – and we would comment on the scenery as it passed by, or trade jokes and barbs, or make plans for where and when to stop for lunch. It was all sort of nerdy, but also thoroughly enjoyable. It’s one thing to tell your friends about the wonders of the open road; it’s quite another to experience it with them.
In fact, while Carlsbad and White Sands and Joshua Tree and the rest were truly breathtaking, my fondest memories of the trip are the moments after we’d parked for the night. They would situate their rented RV next to ours – at a campground in Lordsburg (New Mexico) or Laughlin (Nevada) or Lost Hills (California). Sometimes, we would each cook our own dinners in our own RVs. Other times, we would barbecue together and sit around the fire. Almost always, however, after we put the kids to bed, Adam and Steph would bring a baby monitor into our coach. Then the four of us would hang out for another couple of hours. You could probably hear the laughter echoing in the trees.
It was at those times, surrounded by drawn shades and the black of night, that we could have been excused for forgetting exactly where we were. Tucumari? Elk City? Amarillo? But I think we all suspected there was probably no better place to be.
Here’s another of my periodic Road Royalty pictures. This one was taken by Amy at a rest stop in southern Wyoming. And this time we were willing to share our royal moment.
