My husband and I have just returned from 10 days away from our regular life. We took what began as a COVID pastime fascination with a television program showing people selecting RVs and turned it into educating ourselves about motor homes and travel trailers at the Hersey Pennsylvania RV show a few months ago, till finally, renting an RV and traveling 800 miles, stopping at two locations during Thanksgiving week.I said at the beginning, “This isn’t a vacation. It’s an adventure!” Both vacations and adventures provide an interruption in your usual routine, and often provide a change of scenery, but their goals are very different. A vacation is a time for relaxation, perhaps to be pampered or waited upon so as to recover from the stress of your regular work life. But adventures–they offer excitement, unusual experiences, perhaps bold or risky undertakings, inviting element of stress and challenge, and always include some uncertainty as to their outcome. If you had seen the high fi gesture my husband and I gave one another as we pulled our car into the driveway and heard the boastful dual expression “We DID It!” that accompanied it, you would know that we had just completed an adventure.
My interest in “adventures” probably dates to when I was a social worker in the mental health department of a university health center. I decorated the office wall behind me with inspiring quotes from famous people, to encourage my student clients. One of my favorites was from Helen Keller, “Life is an adventure, or it is nothing!
Well, this was something, partly because we were setting out so late in the fall, risking inclement weather which we got, in spite of driving all the way south to Myrtle Beach, SC.
Lesson here is that you can expect anything done in the outdoors to involve uncertainty due to the unpredictability of the weather. We did say to ourselves, through chattering teeth that next time we’ll do this in a warmer season.
It was something because driving a truck whose newly created engine had been named “Godzilla” by its manufacturer, the Ford Motor Company, was an entirely novel experience for my sports car driver husband. For me, I recognized I was in unfamiliar territory when, sitting outside on the patio beside the RV at a campground, I found myself attempting to reconcile the words and rhythms of two different country western songs as they arrived at my site from the radio stations of two different nearby neighbors. Hum, was this the “meeting new people” I had in mind?
Other names for adventure apply to our “escapade,” which was an escape from the comfort of our temperature-controlled house, and from the leaky roof that our house sprung as a farewell gift a few days before we departed. For me, our journey was a “quest” to connect with nature which we did at the beach and in the forest, and a return to “exploits” of my youth where I traveled the country in a cabover camper RV built by Paris Valley.
The appeal for me of the RV life in those days was that, like a turtle, a snail, or a crab, you carry your home with you. You determine what is essential and pack it, leaving the rest behind in your permanent home. You maintain continuity and familiarity as to your eating and sleeping while you move about the country exploring. Once it’s organized, it’s convenient, but preparations for this adventure were extensive from advanced reservations at campsites to preparing and packing most all the food we would need, along with towels and bedding, and doggie supplies for Cody, and finally several hours of learning to operate all the pumps and systems in a modern RV. (Not the simple ice box, propane stove burners, and chemical port-a-potty of my Paris Valley days.)
Did we get the benefits promised by adventuring? Two psychologists in 1908 came up with a law that was named after them – the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that performance increases with physiological and mental arousal (stress) but only up to a point. When stress is too high, performance decreases. Just in time, we met a couple full timers who travel in the RV of our dreams who gave us a most valuable piece of advice. “Remember, RVing is great but one of the best things about it is, there are hotels with parking lots big enough for you to park and take a break.”
After eating our dinners beside roaring campfires that we built ourselves and sleeping sometimes in my coat since the thermostats in RVs are in need of a bit of improvement, on the way home, a couple of hours drive from where we were to return the RV, we treated ourselves to a night in a hotel with fresh bedlinens, a restaurant dinner and a no-additional-charge breakfast. This part of the adventure reminded my husband that for our next time off, I owe him a vacation.
