2020

July was a month of goodbyes for me. Some goodbyes were harder than others. Some were expected and others came out of the blue. Some I handled well and others not so much.  Goodbyes are never easy. They often come with regret, with longing for the past, with wondering if you've made the right decision.  One goodbye that Randy and I have been discussing for a while now is letting go of the motorhome we inherited when his mother died in November of 2017. While it is sad to let that piece of her legacy go, that sense of adventure and exploration and discovery, it was a necessary next step.  The money we got from selling the motorhome will help us continue progressing in the adoption process, and show that we are committed to providing a stable environment for the boys. (The adoption lady wasn't impressed that we have had 6 different addresses in the 5 years we have been together, and many more months with no address at all. And while it was an incredibly fun and...

Let me start by apologizing for leaving you hanging last year. Last I wrote we were being cast as characters in a Truman Capote novel, witnesses to the crime of the century in Kansas. That was "Leg 21." There were other legs. We went on to tour museums in Missouri and stay at an epic campground in Illinois and sleep in the Friends United Meeting parking lot in Indiana and eventually made it to Ohio, where we slept in the RV in a short-term parking lot at the Columbus airport waiting for Randy's daughter, Danielle, to arrive to retrieve Van. Once Van and Danielle were safely back in California, Randy and I hit the road again. We went to Toledo for hot dogs, slept in a Home Depot parking lot in Michigan, climbed sand dunes in Indiana and swam in Lake Michigan with my brother and his kids, played baseball on the Field of Dreams and attended my grandmother's memorial service in my second childhood home of Hubbard, Iowa. We broke into the home where my grandmot...

I didn't want Randy to be disappointed by not going to Lincoln, to visit his brother's birthplace, but as soon as he saw how close we were to the world's largest ball of twine, he quickly decided we should head south and see that instead. No sooner had we crossed the border into Kansas than we saw a sign for the Center of the United States. What???! We had already been to the Center... in South Dakota! Obviously we took the turn off and there it was -- a gorgeous little rest stop, with a tiny little chapel, marking the geologic center of the lower 48 states. This had been the center up until 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted into the U.S., and Kansas was proud of it! A short ways down the road from the Center, we came to the world's largest ball of twine. Call it cheesy if you want, but if you can't get excited about Americana and a tradition that brought a town together then you are going to miss out on so much fun! Van's favorite part of...

As if the Geological Center of the United States, Deadwood, Sturgiss, Spearfish Canyon and Mt. Rushmore weren't enough, we discovered that South Dakota has so much more to offer. Too much to explore on this trip. But we did add in a few more stops. From Mt. Rushmore it is less than a half-hour drive to get to Crazy Horse Memorial . Like Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse is a carving in the side of a mountain, mostly created from strategically placed dynamite blasts. Korczak Ziolkowski, one of the men who worked on Mt. Rushmore, was approached by Chief Henry Standing Bear and the Lakota people to create a monument to one of their own heroes. Ziolkowski agreed with one stipulation: that he would never take any government funding--his own way of protesting the unfair treatment of our government on native people. Ziolkowski turned down multiple million-dollar offerings from the government in his lifetime. It is for this reason that the monument remains a work-in-progress to this day. The ...

Of all the states we were planning to travel to in our 4 months of wandering, South Dakota was the only one I had never been to. So obviously I was most excited about this one! I had always wanted to see Mt Rushmore, and even though I've heard people say it is disappointing, I didn't care. It was still tops on my bucket list! After visiting Devil's Tower, Wyoming, we once again started heading east, making the short drive to South Dakota. We stopped at the rest stop/visitor's center on the border of the two states and asked for a recommendation of an RV park. The woman suggested we go to Wyatt's Hideaway in her hometown of Belle Fourche (pronounced "bell foosh"). We had already been to Belle Fourche -- it was the geologic center of the United States that we had passed through earlier in the day -- but we were all about taking recommendations from locals, so back to the center we went! And we were so glad we did. The plan had only been to spend o...