Minnesota mishaps and life lessons from the road

It was about 11:45 p.m. when I finally settled back into the air mattress to get some sleep on Monday (June 27). I was five days into my cross-country road trip and just hitting my second real day on the road.

I spent the first three days of the trip in Chicago visiting my sister, my long-time friend Matt, and basically eating every “typical” Chicago food that was ever mentioned in Chloe Neill’s Chicagoland Vampire series, a book series that I have devoured for years (bad pun intended). Day four was a stop in Madison to visit former law firm colleagues, sample and purchase obligatory cheeses and cheese curds on State Street, and then an easy hour north to the Wisconsin Dells to sleep. By day five I was in Northern Minnesota at Buffalo River State Park, exhausted from the 6-and-a-half-hour drive to get there from the Dells and the morning’s activities before it. Those activities being dealing with a leaking ice chest soaking everything in Princess (the Jeep), and a boat ride/mini-hikes around the Dells (separate post on this soon, I promise), while I tried to be a little zen about the aforementioned ice chest.

But back to 11:45 p.m. There I am, exhausted and settling back into the air mattress that fits snuggly inside of the Jeep. (Yes, that’s right, I’m not just road tripping around the country in Princess, I’m car camping around the country. Literally). That’s when it starts. Rain. Hard rain. Pouring rain. No big deal, right? This is why I’m sleeping in the Jeep, right? Wrong. Big deal, because the mats and towels that were soaked from the leaking cooler are all out on the picnic table to dry. So out I go, all but tumbling out of the car as I try to both delicately place my feet into the flip-flops on the ground outside the passenger side door, while also doing a full back extension to get above the air mattress and not let any rain in the car. (If you are having trouble picturing it, imagine a banana with legs trying to get out of car while also sticking a perfect landing.) Once I hit the ground though, I was like lightening. Scooping up the mats and towels I shoved them into the driver’s seat, which was the only space free in the car. Score! Or not, because right then the car alarm goes off.

“You have to be f****ing, kidding me.” (I am quoting this because it was actually said IRL).

I start the car. It keeps sounding. I lock and unlock the doors. Still sounding. I open and shut the doors. Blaring away. I start the car again. It just keeps on blaring. Just as I start rummaging around for the car manual, my face now a deep shade of red because I am sure there is not a soul in all of Buffalo River State Park who does not want to kill the girl in the purple Jeep, it stopped. I have no idea why it stopped, but it was with great trepidation and several mini-prayers that I finally climbed back into the Jeep (slightly soaked myself now) and locked the doors. Once I was free and clear of an encore though, I burst out laughing.

Leaky coolers, unexpected rain, mysterious car alarms, to me, this is the stuff that good travel and great trips are made of. The messy stuff. The unexpected stuff. The “it wasn’t supposed to be this way,” but it is stuff. These types of moments make up some of my best travel stories over the years. (Like that time my friend Sandra and I got food poisoning in Paris, or the saga of going from photocopy shop to photocopy shop to find a class syllabus in Argentina – if you are unfamiliar with these stories, drop a comment, and I’ll send them to you. They are archived away in the ghosts of blog stories from travel long past). They are also the moments where, looking back, I grew. Dealing with the unexpected, the difficult, the quirky on the road has always been where I’ve learned. As I think about it, knowing that that is where I grow is probably a large part of why I decided to spend two months of my life-on-leave on the road, crossing the U.S. in and living out of the back of my Jeep. Travel is something that’s familiar, but this whole car-camping cross country road trip, well that’s totally new.

And here I was (am), not even a week in, and I’m right in the middle of it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So, what have I learned in my first five days on the road? (A whole lot, but I’ll give you my top 10 — two for each day because I’m feeling generous and, in many cases, extremely humbled).

• It does not matter whether I am 39 or 13, when the cooler is leaking/the car is making a weird noise/unexpected problem x, y, z is occurring, I will call my father or my mother, or most likely my mother to then ask to speak to my father.

• My father will have the answer to the question that prompted the life lesson in #1. If he doesn’t, my mother will. If she doesn’t, they know a guy or a gal and that person will. They likely went to college with said person. That person is likely with them at the fishing camp. Lucky for me, they like to spend a lot of time at the camp.

• When taking a road trip keep the car manual easily accessible and remember where you placed it. (Technically, I knew this before I got on the road, which is why I moved it to a more convenient location, which I’m sure would have been helpful if I could have remembered where that was when the alarm sounded). Either way, I share this with you just in case.

• The I-Phone weather app will fail you. It will fail you in Minnesota at 11:45 p.m. It will fail you in Chicago (yes, that’s right, contrary to Apple’s predictions, it did rain on Saturday morning, and we were out sightseeing in it). It will fail you, so keep your umbrella handy and your rain jacket close.  Be prepared for anything, basically.

• The road, like everything else in life, has a rhythm to it. Right now, I’m at the beginning of this trip, and I feel out of rhythm. Things take so long—finding the campsite, setting up camp, unpacking the car, repacking the car, cooking breakfast/lunch/dinner, getting on the road in the morning, getting ice . . . the list goes on. There are a million steps to doing these simple little things that despite my best googling, YouTube watching, and advice asking have to be lived and learned to get them. So, I am living and learning them, and hoping that I catch the beat soon.

• I sleep better in the Jeep than in a tent. This is an excellent sign for the next two months, not such a great sign for my next backpacking trip.

• Your car is no different from a tent. If you park it on an incline, you will sleep on an incline and do all of the sliding and slipping that comes with said incline. Keep it level.

• The most important thing I have done in the last 5 months was develop a daily yoga practice. It means that I stretch, almost mechanically, when I wake up in the morning, when I get out the car to get gas, when I get to camp at night. It means that I can drive 5-6 hours a day, hike 6+ miles, move and enjoy this trip thus far without any real pain. For those of you who have seen my struggle with my back and neck, you know this is amazing. It was also my biggest fear, honestly, when I decided to take this trip. Fun Fact – that yoga practice is also what got me up and balanced on a surfboard in Nicaragua, and it kept me moving after marathon walking days in Mexico. I repeat, yoga, the most important thing I have done since leaving work.  Yoga, it will change your life.

• There is a lot to be said for silence, for the moments when we don’t speak and instead just listen to the world around us, to the people we meet. There is a lot of be said for just taking it in. (This is a really long lesson actually, so for now I’ll just leave it here).
• And last but not least, there is just as much beauty on the way there as there is in the destination. When I started planning this trip, I looked at the drive through Wisconsin and Minnesota as simply a necessary part of the journey, something to get me to North Dakota, where I am now, to see Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP). While all of that is true, it is also true that they are so much more. Green fields, blue lakes, winding rivers lined with sandstone rock formations, forests filled with chipmunks, deer, birds to sing me awake in the morning. I’d have missed it all if I had been so focused on the getting to TRNP that I hadn’t kept my eyes, my ears, and my head/heart open to what I might see along the way. Given that beauty, my only regret thus far is that I didn’t build a little more time in to stay in each a bit longer.

Speaking of the destination, I did in fact make it to TRNP, and it is stunning. Thus far, I have had no more mishaps with the car alarm (though I have now fully brushed up on how to turn it off if I do so BRING IT ON (just kidding, totally kidding)). But I have had a lot of encounters with bison, prairie dogs, and these gorgeous buttes that make up the badlands. I’ll have a post about it (WITH PICTURES) right on the heels of this one as I work on catching the rhythm of this whole blogging-from-the-back-of-the-Jeep thing, an added component to the rhythm of the road.

**Please excuse all typos, grammatical errors, and other weird punctuation. Sometimes the light in Princess isn’t the best for proofing. Since this isn’t a legal brief, I’m just going to let it go until I get to a place where I can fix it.**