Life with the Beck Family … motor home tales … as we get into summer, I remembered a while ago I said I would share some of our adventures … remember the motor home was not the Ritz (https://www.facebook.com/danielle.oser/posts/10161609976607898) … we repeatedly made trips from Utah to South Dakota in the box on wheels to deliver my sister and me to “Camp Grandma” … And it was usually somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, that disaster would strike like lightning …
Now, if you’ve never done it, the trip across Wyoming is picturesque, for about 20 minutes … maybe five minutes if it’s your tenth trip across and you are a temperamental tween … and it was usually hot … dry heat is still hot … so it was a huge surprise to be greeted by a gust of wind while perusing my Sassy magazine in my seat at the table … you see the gummy black residue that had held the window above the sleeping area in place for more than 40 years was no match for the heat and relentless wind and it just gave up … blowing out the window in many pieces and causing a windstorm of biblical proportions when cruising along at 60ish mph … and of course, we were in the middle of nowhere… armed with the blankets and duct tape and maybe a cardboard soda box … Dad somehow McGyvered a patch and we limped into the only open lumberyard in Rawlins (a town of maybe 10,000) on a Sunday … where Dad managed to sweet talk someone into cutting a plywood replacement for the window … while my sister and I roamed yet another hardware store for a few hours … I can still smell the metallic nails, paint, farm chemicals and freshly cut wood … the day ended with a trip to visit the Wyoming Frontier Prison … we know how to travel …
Another adventure … again in the middle of nowhere Wyoming … included the blowout of one of the inner tires … one second we were fine … the next there was a notable thud … Dad decided we would have to hobble into the next town … but we needed to make sure we kept the weight off that side of the motor home … now between my sister and I we might have weighed 150 pounds … not a huge drop in the bucket in the big scheme of things … but in my brain that meant stay on the right side … so I sent my sis to sit on the toilet … for 100+ miles … and it was not the first day of the trip, freshness was not guaranteed … my Mom finally noticed she had not heard us squabbling for a while … I was loudly told to release the bathroom counterweight … she still hasn’t really forgiven me …
But not all of the trips were riddled with disaster … there were late-night speed card game battles … excursions to the local lakes and reservoirs for days of sand and sun … my mom’s forays into decorating with poster tack as the main adhesive (poster tack + heat = sad mom) … a very memorable attempt to learn how to windsurf (most unsuccessful) … trips with dogs and friends and so many random pit-stops along the way … my sister has even more tales I’m sure (I think there was a trip to the Grand Canyon that I missed) …
The motorhome is long gone now … maybe it is still rolling along on another adventure … it would be super “vintage” cool today … maybe getting one mile to the gallon … but to me, I will always hear the door squeak opening in my mind and know that we would soon be off on another misadventure in the “pimp mobile.”
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