The First Week [and a half]

I know, I know… you thought we’d forgotten about this whole blog thing… but we’re here, and we’re living in our tiny home. I’ve been putting off writing this post because, like most of the world, we’re living with a lot of uncertainty right now. I had originally planned to end each post with “Next stop: [fill in the blank with the next picturesque destination]”, and now I have no idea how to fill in that blank. Can we actually do any of the things we originally planned to do? Should we continue moving? Where can we go? But I’ve decided to accept that it may be a long time before we can answer any of those questions and I ought to let everyone know what we’ve been up to in this rapidly changing country of ours.

For those of you who don’t know the back story, in the middle of 2019, Sean and I decided to take a year off and travel around the United States beginning in Feb/Mar 2020.

With only a few weeks of vacation each year, we have always made the most of it by taking amazing international trips: most recently Jordan, Thailand, Kenya & Tanzania…we’ve seen some really amazing places and experienced vastly different cultures. But we hadn’t really explored the beauty in our own backyard; there are so many spectacular places in the United States. We also wanted to hike the many national and state parks while we are still young and physically fit. So we bought an RV, Sean quit his job, and I obtained approval for personal leave from work from March 2020 to March 2021.

We got a later start than expected because we had decided to renovate the interior of the RV (more on that in another post), and as it turns out, sanding and painting an entire RV takes a really, really, really long time. Who knew?

So we officially rolled out of Houston on Thursday, March 12th. Our first stop was Lakeway, TX (just north of Austin) where my best friend lives. We packed everyone in the RV (Sean, me, and our two dogs + my best friend, her husband, their almost-2yo, and their dog) and headed to Wimberley, TX. It was a full house!

This was at the beginning of the talk of social distancing so we went to Shady Llama, a spacious beer and wine garden where we could sit apart from others to enjoy the scenery and watch the free roaming llamas on the property.

We also got to see my mom and her boyfriend who were in town for probably one of the last weddings for a while in 2020!

Next Sean, the dogs, and I headed to the Caverns of Sonora in Texas Hill Country for a night. These caverns are pretty far from the next large city but have RV spots on site, making them the perfect spot to stop on our westward journey. Their caverns were unlike other caves we’ve been in due to the copious “popcorning” or mineral deposits along most of the formations caused in large part by the high humidity in the area.

Bruno also enjoyed chatting with their peacocks, chickens, and roosters.

Our last stop in Texas would be Marfa, TX, home of the mysterious “Marfa lights”. We spent two nights there hoping to see these unexplained lights hovering on the horizon near the small town of Marfa. Alas we found the Marfa lights to be far too elusive (i.e. we never saw any). We still aren’t sure whether we just weren’t lucky enough to be there on a night that they were out or whether people are actually mistaking the traffic and street lights in town for a natural phenomenon. We saw several people taking pictures of the small town in the distance, but perhaps those people just weren’t the brightest bulbs in the bunch.

We did however get to see one of the spectacular sunsets from the Marfa Lights viewing point (and the dogs made a new friend).

We were “evicted” from our RV park in Marfa (which was OK because we had planned to move on anyway) due to a mandate by the town of Marfa in response to the spread of the coronavirus. This began my ongoing anxiety of where we could stay and where we should go…

And so we continued on toward New Mexico and stopped at the Guadalupe Mountains on the way to Carlsbad Caverns.

The day before we were planning to head to Carlsbad, they announced the caverns were closed. We decided to head that direction anyway to go to White Sands National Monument. The next day, they announced White Sands was closed. To top it all off we had our third tire blow out and decided to remove the last of the “china bombs” from the trailer. We were not “on a roll”…

In the end we decided to back track a little and make the long drive towards the Chiricahua (pronounced ‘cheer-a-cow-uh’) National Monument on the border of New Mexico and Arizona. Nearby we have found our new home for several days at Rusty’s RV Ranch in Rodeo, NM.

After driving through hundreds of miles of nothingness, past only a couple of the tiniest towns I’ve ever seen to get here, we feel we have really mastered social distancing. We have beautiful 360 views of the mountains and don’t think it will be much of a hardship to call this place home for the next several days.

Yesterday we took a long, windy, and very high drive to the Chiricahua Mountains and hiked in the national monument.

We have decided to take this one day at a time. We aren’t sure what we’ll do next. For now we are happy to be in a beautiful place, in this beautiful weather, much farther away from people than we could ever be in Houston.

We made the decision long before coronavirus was even a whisper in Wuhan to take what was initially a small, calculated risk in our lives. Unfortunately the timing is terrible but we could never have anticipated a global pandemic when we started planning. So for now we’re staying at least 6 feet away from people and doing the best we can day-to-day.

We wish you all good health and happiness in these unfathomable circumstances. I promise to give you a virtual tour of our tiny home renovation very soon!

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