I am going to Alabama. My husband has sent a deposit of faith and cash to a man in Montgomery who is selling a used motor home we would like to buy. We’ll arrive by airplane, exchange pleasantries, and then, if everything is as it should be, we’ll toss our bags into that particular recreational vehicle, climb aboard, and drive home to New England.

We plan to stop in Atlanta to see friends. Then mosey on down the road to Asheville, to see Asheville. And after that, we’ll share 900 miles of come what may.

I texted my son and daughter: We are going to Alabama. Dad bought a luxury motor home. An adventure! Like the first time we got one. I’m sure there will be room in the compartments for your tents and boogie boards. The road is my home.

*****

When I was a ninth-grader in Arizona, I took a school bus Monday through Friday from the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains, just north of the Mexican border, to my regional high school, just south of Tucson. The commute was one hour, each way, no AC. On a typical non-winter’s day in the Sonoran Desert, the interior temp of the bus, at rest under the unobstructed rays of the sun, could rise to over 120 degrees. Once we got going, though, hot air blasted through the open windows and cooled our ride to a blessed 115 degrees. It was one, big, yellow convection oven.

Our bus driver was a large Italian man, who learned about patience in New York City where he had lived until he retired with his family to the borderland boondocks of Arizona. No funny stuff on his bus. After the godfather of bus drivers delivered us to school and drove out of sight, I’d walk with a few friends back to the highway—a major trucking route. There, we’d space ourselves out along the breakdown lane, and hitchhike to Tucson. We didn’t have cell phones in our pockets, only our doled out lunch money which we used to buy Big Gulps all day, chasing them back with strips of beef jerky.

We’d hitchhike back to school in time to ride the school bus to nowheresville again, our bodily fluids replenished for the sweltering journey home.

Once, a big truck stopped to give me a ride. I felt all Janis Joplin, as if my once-in-a-lifetime chance to light out for the territories had arrived. I was ready to put flowers in my hair, embroider peace signs onto my bell-bottomed hip huggers, learn how to sing the blues, and proclaim the road as my home.

I was fourteen. Old enough.

Eventually, I got nabbed for chronic truancy and was sentenced to the wastelands of after-school detention where my drifter/dreamer habits of mind were to begin the long process of reformation.

It was too late. I’d arrived in Arizona from Indiana in a convoy of two station wagons with one break down in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

I loved America and I wanted to be a cowboy.

******

I’m supposed to be packing up some things we might need for our road trip from Alabama to New England and it’s making me think about my honeymoon almost 30 years ago. We packed some things back then—a tent and sleeping bags at least—and flew to New Mexico where we got a car and drove around Colorado, Utah, Arizona and back to New Mexico. Everything we needed fit into the trunk of our rental car.

Monument Valley, circa 1988, and our first road house.

This time we don’t need the tent, or the compact backpack stove. And it’s rattling my brain—the way driving on a pot-holed, frost-heaved highway rattles my brain—to know we need cell phones, computers, chargers, and some money.

So far, I’ve purchased a brand new, big, clumsy-paged Rand-McNally Road Atlas. Published and printed in the U.S.A.

Every page in that grand picture book looks to me like a slice of my brain.

*******

The motor home lifestyle was always my husband’s big idea. He presented the plan to me when our children were toddlers and they used to crawl all over us in our tent, all night long, on every camping trip.

I didn’t really know anything about motor homes.

But after we got one, our weekends together as a family began to last forever. Time slowed down. There was live music and storytelling and great food and crackling campfires. Life smelled like fresh-cooked bacon and damp books and bug spray.

American and Canadian blacktops became strewn with flower petals,

as our windshield got smattered with bug guts.

We called our rig the family camper and gave the kids their own tents when they could throw an axe, with precision, while blindfolded, through the center of a television screen.

Indeed, after I texted the kids about the motor home, my son sent a text: That’s badass! Hopefully you got one with a lot of exterior tvs.

My reply: Of course. And the satellite dish converts to a hot tub.

This one looks to me like it might be a Las Vegas Lounge Glamper.

But I am crazy for the driver because he is fun, so I’m on board with whatever he wants to do

and wherever we end up going.

********

The last family road house, circa 2012, Lime Rock Race Park

The dad on the roof, watching the son learn how to be a race car driver.