It's been a wild few weeks, between the ups and downs of my vacation and the chaos of finding a teardrop trailer online. As soon as my friend tagged me in a Facebook post for the ad I started sending the owner messages to arrange a time to pick it up. He got back to me very quickly, and we decided to meet in a Walmart parking lot so I could see it.
This worked out really well, both because it gave us somewhere public to meet and because it gave me the chance to see all the other people on their own road trips, taking advantage of the free parking lot. If you've never looked into doing a long-distance road trip, you might not realize it, but Walmart stores across North America offer free overnight parking. Some will refuse, but in general they don't mind, and the same goes for casinos.
The idea is that if you spend time there you're likely to also spend your money there, so they're happy to have you. This Walmart in particular already had four campers or modified mini-vans there for the night. One was quite large and even had a tip out extended.
It was a smaller camper that caught my attention though. Why? Was it fancy? Was it covered in glitter? No. It was because of the young woman in it. I had to go over and meet this woman, so I walked over to her camper. At first I could tell she was a bit surprised to see me, and who could blame her, I mean there I was outside her door, a complete stranger. I stood back to give her some space and introduced myself.
I started with "Hi, you don't know me, but..." which is my best cold approach in any situation, and the next thing I knew I was in her camper getting a tour of the small space. We talked for a while before the gentleman arrived with the trailer for me, chatting about life on the road, about the work she'd done on her camper, about all the things she had learned along the way. In only a few minutes she told me about her adventures last summer, when she hitchhiked across the country, and the people she had met along the way. Her bravery encouraged me in ways I can't even put words to.
A lot of the time people like to tell me that they are worried about me travelling as a woman, they ask me if someone is going with me, what I'm doing to protect myself. I asked this young woman if she ever got nervous travelling with her camper, about people breaking in, and I don't think I'll ever forget what she said. She told me "People ask me, they go 'What if someone breaks into your trailer?' and I say 'What if someone breaks into your house?' It's the same thing."
My house will be on wheels next summer, but that doesn't mean it has any more inherent risk than anything else in life. I'm working hard to plan for as many things to go sideways as I reasonably can, but of course there will be things that I can't plan for, just like there are things that you can't plan for every time you leave the house. Life is wild, and I'm learning that we are meant to be wild right along with it.
We only get one shot at this, so why waste even a single day living a life that doesn't make you feel alive and free?
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