Because We Can - Fulltime RV'ing

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Road G

Recently we left where we were staying near Cortez, and drove to Bluff, Utah. There is nothing unusual in doing something like that, RVers do it all the time. Yet looking back on it, perhaps it says more about our approach to this Life than first indicated. There are a number of different ways to get from point "A" to point "B" as one travels through life. For some people it is all about the time, for others it is about the journey. In our former life, vacation time was valuable, and knowing that we'd drive madly for a thousand miles to get to where we were going so we could spend a week madly driving around to see as much as we could, then drive madly back home and wonder why our vacation had passed by so fast.

I had probably better interject at this point that it was I who wanted to do and did all that driving, else it won't pass review by my ever vigilant editor. Old habits die hard, and those didn't die on the day we quit our jobs to live the Life we now lead. It didn't take very long, however, to see that there were far better ways to see what we wanted to see. Maybe that was why the trip we took across Road G stuck in my mind. It was simply a microcosm of how we now approach Life.

On the pages of the road atlas there are blue roads and red roads, the roads most people take. The blue being the Interstates, the red the US highways. There are also black roads and gray roads, the black being the state highways and the gray being county roads. For our trip that day the starting point and ending point were already established, it was the route between the two that yet to be decided. That is where Road G came in, a gray line on the atlas with no designation accompanying it. With all the technology of the modern world at our fingertips it only took a couple of clicks of the mouse to discover that we could certainly get to our destination on this gray road. Besides we had driven a portion of it last year when we were in the area, though not in the RV, so we knew it was a decent road.

Sure there were trade offs. A narrow somewhat curvy road with no berms for one thing, of course the lack of traffic made that pretty much a non factor. We also knew the section we had driven last year followed along a valley which had many pleasant views. Couple that with the fact we were in absolutely no hurry, and our route was set. The 72 mile drive took us two hours and three minutes to complete, which means we averaged just under 36 mph for the drive. It was the type of road where most of the vehicles you see are pickup trucks, though we did meet one semi truck hauling a load of cattle.

Are all days like this? Certainly not, and as I type these words our drive yesterday was 321 miles and today's will be 299 miles, yet only 10 of those were on the Interstate, all the rest being on the roads less traveled. Is Road G a ribbon of asphalt or is it a mindset? Does it have to be one or the other? The key here is not to claim to be the superior traveler because of how we travel, rather it is to point out that there are many different ways to get from point "A" to point "B", and what road we take is not the important thing, it is the fact that we actually made the journey. It has been years now since we made that fateful decision to quit our jobs and hit the road. The most wondrous thing about this Life is something we never foresaw, the fact the journey keeps getting better and better.

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