Week 1 Report From The Road
Holding onto the Safety Net
My monthlong road trip began Sunday, July 2. The plan is to use this trip to challenge myself and practice the camping life more fully and for a longer period than what I have done up to this point. As it turned out, Week 1 proved to be less an experiment in solo camping than it was a series of family reunions and easy living. Hence the subtitle of this article, as I did not put myself into any situation where I didn’t have a full safety net in place. No regrets whatsoever. I still have three more weeks to experience the more challenging aspects of solo camping. Here are some of the highlights so far:
Poignant Memories
Day 1 began and ended as a drizzly, rainy, cloudy day, perfect for being on the road all day! There were pockets of dry relief here and there, but I didn’t need them for brightening my mood. I was already happy and excited, having a couple of ideas of what I wanted to do, but not locked into anything except making Dunkirk, New York by suppertime. About six hours into the first day, with minimal stops, my first destination was Lake Erie State Park. I visited “the bench” that my siblings and I donated in memory of our parents. The park and general area has been a favorite destination for our family for many, many years and sits just down the road from Van Buren Point where my maternal grandfather (Fred Larson, maker of the 1938 scrapbook and organizer of the California trip I will be replicating this fall) built a cottage on the lake in the 1930’s. Sadly, he would not live long enough to enjoy it with his grandchildren, but I have many happy memories of Larson family gatherings there when I was a child.
This particular beach is not what one would consider sandy, and is covered with stones of all sizes, shapes and colors, large and small pieces of black slate, tiny shells, and driftwood blown in from who knows where.
The playground and beach area near the overlook where the bench sits was totally empty when I arrived. Rainy days have a way of deterring families from venturing outside, but for me the empty park and the steady drizzle enveloped and welcomed me. The dense moisture in the air provided a somewhat surreal feel to the surroundings that was very comforting and peaceful. Before going to the bench I walked first to the water’s edge.
In earlier times before the near complete domination of plastics as a primary driver of our economy, containers were typically glass. As children we spent many hours on the beach looking for beach glass, with the telltale faded surface and soft edges resulting from years of being pummeled by waves before being deposited on the beach. My siblings and I created our own market for these sought-after treasures. With ferocious bargaining and deal-making, we didn’t stop trading back and forth until at least one of us had the perfect combination of white, green, brown and, if the negotiations were very successful, the oh-so-rare blue, turquoise or red. At that point the victor closed the market and trading ceased for the day. As you can imagine, being third out of four I invariably felt that I had lost out no matter what I had in my stash at the time the market closed. Such is the nature of thinking that your older sister and brother knew more and were (almost) always right. Whatever they ended up with was always going to be better than what I had. Nowadays, good luck finding any beach glass on a given day at this beach.
As I walked beside the water, the muscle memory of my eyes inevitably shifted my gaze from the shoreline to the sand at my feet. As I have been doing for over sixty years, I scanned the beach for a beautiful stone or the rare piece of beach glass, or even a small shell (I have many such items at home from previous visits). I couldn’t resist the urge to pick up a piece of slate and skip it across the water (4 skips, pretty good for me!). When I bent down to pick up the slate I saw two small, yellow stones speaking to me from among the black, white and gray ones. I picked them up. I launched the flat piece of slate over the water and watched it skip out to sea, reminded of the previous year when our entire family (about 20 people of various ages) came to this very spot and dipped slate pieces into the ashes of our parents and skipped them into the waves as our final goodbye.
I made my way up the little hill that overlooks the beach and placed the two stones on the bench. Somehow it seemed fitting and I thought about the love that those two little stones represented for me in that moment as they looked out over the water.
I sat on the bench with the stones for a moment, then put them in my pocket and walked back to the van.
Meeting Up With Family
I had arranged to spend the night (inside a nice dry house with my own bed and bathroom privileges) with my aunt and cousin. My cousin is the namesake of our grandfather Fred Larson. It had been a year since I had seen them and we had a very pleasant evening catching up, sharing memories of the past, and just hanging out. On the way to their house I stopped by the Fredonia cemetery, where my Larson grandparents and my own parents’ ashes are buried. It was still raining, which seemed fitting for the solemnity of the moment.
From Dunkirk and Fredonia I drove to Ashfield, Massachusetts, my sister’s octogon-shaped retreat in the Berkshires. I was the last to arrive for our sibling reunion, which had been on our calendars for several months. North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan and Massachusetts were represented. Such a luxury to spend several days together with no agenda whatsoever! A few highlights:
My brother Sam (the keeper of the vast majority of family archives from both sides of our family, and also the family genealogist), brought several boxes of historical items with him. We were able to peruse the photo albums and historical notes from my mother’s and father’s files at our leisure. One of the photo albums he brought had come from a distant Larson relative, Katie, who found Sam through Ancestry.com, then connected with me after I sent her the Family Breadcrumbs website link. Her grandfather was Walter, the brother of my grandfather Fred, and one of the 11 children of Frank, who emigrated from Sweden in 1881 (see my earlier blog articles where I share some of the early history of Frank and his brothers and their families).
When Katie learned about the research Sam and I have been doing into the Larson family history, she began to get interested in her own family branch. With an unbelievable degree of trust for two people she had never met, she mailed to Sam her family albums from her grandmothers that had been sitting in her garage for many decades. She encouraged us to take a look and see if we could recognize any of the people in the photos. Not only did we recognize many of the people from our mother’s pictures, but quite a number of the photos from those early decades of the 1900’s appeared in both family albums.
Across the back row (left to right) are my grandparents, Fred and Lucille, and Katie’s grandparents, Gert and Walter. In the front on the left is my Uncle Bill with my mother Joan behind him, with their cousin Walt Jr., Katie’s dad, to their right.
The icing on the cake came when we discovered a photo (above) in Katie’s book that we did not have in ours. That photo shows both families together, with her father and my mother (first cousins) side by side in the foreground, with their parents (our grandparents) behind them. Such a fun connection!!
The story of Katie’s grandfather Walter and her father Walter Jr. will unfold as I go deeper into some of the historical events that led to the 1938 journey to California. That trip included a stop-off in Mobile, Alabama, where Walter’s family lived. This destination was not on the original planned route. Future articles will explain why that part of the trip was added to the itinerary. It is also on my itinerary for October.
Still Wrestling With the Camper
I continue to be baffled by the interconnections among my electrical devices. I have the car battery, the camper batteries, an inverter, a battery charger, and a “kill switch.” When something goes wrong, like the inverter squawking at me with a beeping and error code, or my battery starts draining when I don’t think it should, I struggle to understand how it’s all supposed to work together and what I need to do to fix the immediate problem and avoid new ones. When I wrote about my near electrical disaster back in May (Field Trip if you haven’t read it yet), I erroneously thought that I had a rudimentary understanding of at least the kill switch and inverter. That turned out not to be the case at all.
Enter brother Sam and brother-in-law David to the rescue. They couldn’t answer my questions initially, but took on the task of figuring it all out and putting it into a language (with pictures) I could understand, determined to succeed before I drove off two days later. I must say that, while I adore the folks at Drifter Vans, they don’t (yet) have an easy to use manual that explains how the entire electrical system works and how to maintain it (manuals for the different separate devices only get you so far, and for me it wasn’t far enough).
After quite a bit of research and studying and playing around with my system, as well as experimenting with different settings (hence the squawking and errors), Sam and Dave finally figured out what I could not, and I now have a custom-made, color-coded schematic that explains everything and also provides some “rules of the road” to follow when I am trying to conserve battery power.
Yay!!!! I have more confidence now in my ability to manage that complex system. I even have a better understanding of what Amp, watt and voltage mean (or, at least I did a couple of days ago… better look at my notes again…).
Peace and Tranquility - Perfect Way to Start a Day
While the brothers were busy unpacking my electrical system, poring over the contents of the archived boxes (and otherwise enjoying themselves), I joined my sister on her morning swims across the local lake. I’ll confess in confidence to you here that I really did not want to go, but she’s my big sister. When she invited me to join her friends, how could I say no? My personal vanity and self-image took over, and I didn’t want to be known to her friends as the sister who was too wimpy to swim in the lake. Cold!!! But oh so refreshing!!! No regrets!
Mesmerizing beauty at 7am.
To her credit, Carol put no pressure on me at all – well, maybe just enough to get me thinking seriously about doing it. I did the rest myself. And Carol’s friends are such interesting people and were very welcoming to this newcomer! The swim was leisurely enough that we could converse easily while also feeling like we were doing something important for our bodies as well as overall health and well-being. I can highly recommend this as a daily ritual (although the chance that I will take this up as my own 7am morning routine is pretty much nil…).
Other Highlights from Week 1
The nice thing about spending several days uninterrupted by work or family business agendas is the opportunity to visit favorite haunts from when I lived in Massachusetts and was visiting Carol more regularly.
Walking across the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls is always a favorite summertime ritual. Never gets old.
Other activities included hikes to new places, visits to old favorites (like Herrell’s Ice Cream in Northampton, for example), and sharing memories and family videos. (I’ve put a link to what’s maybe our all-time favorite family musical recording on my Snippets and Tidbits page for you to enjoy if you are so inclined - be warned: it is not quite the musical masterpiece we had envisioned…). It’s called Birthday Memories.
So week 1 of my July road trip was filled with family love and making new memories together. I did not venture out of my comfort zone at all, and although I slept in my camper, I was maybe 15 feet from the front door of the house, where I had full access to bathroom, shower, kitchen, screened porch, air conditioning, and comfortable furniture to lounge around in. I don’t really think you could call that camping. Glamping, maybe, at best.
As I’m finishing up this article and getting it ready to post, I’m deep into Week 2 of the camping road trip. Those highlights will come next!
