Letting life come to you.....

Angora Lake...Michelle D. and Jen (left to right)

You know how you have dreamt about some future vacation, and built it up in your mind to the point where the reality of what you had planned had no chance of living up to the image you had in your mind?  And you no doubt remember that sometimes all that planning and dreaming was dashed to pieces on occasion by Mr. Jello?  That used to happen a lot to me before I became a nomad.  When your life is proscribed by the boundless schedules, responsibilities, and duties that are implicitly a part of normal stix and brix living, of raising children, and of a workaday life you feel you must squeeze every ounce of pleasure and adventure out of your recreation time......the time you carved out of your busy schedule to get away from it all and do things for which your regular life had no available time slots.....there was no place for Miss Serendipity.....in fact she probably attempted to introduce herself on more than one occasion, but you just ignored her advances.....she was not part of your master plan for the "perfect vacation".  

At the end of your "vacation" you felt like you needed another vacation to recover from the vacation......often you returned to your "regular" life exhausted from all the fun you had....and you never thought the vacation was long enough.  It doesn't matter whether it was a 3 day weekend, or 2 weeks, or even a month......it was never long enough, because you tried to create the dream vacation every time, which is, of necessity, crammed full of activities, and must do things.  You never really got the chance to just let the fun, adventure, or just "life", come to you.   That is the charm of the nomadic life.....no planning, no expectations.....just take life as it comes at you.

The first few months of traveling we lived like we were on vacation, and this seems to be pretty typical for "new" nomads.  You never stay anywhere more than a few days, and you crisscross the country several times.  For us it took almost a year for us to realize we needed to slow down, and to realize that we were not on vacation....we were just living on the road.  

When we arrived at my sister's home in Spokane, WA after 4 months of travel we had already covered 8,000 miles....we were exhausted.  We spent 5 weeks in Spokane getting to know the town.  It was the first time we had thought about sitting in one place for an extended time frame, and we really liked it.  We came to know the area surrounding Spokane all the way to Couer d'Alene, and really liked what we found.

Our next experience involving extended stay was in Campbellsville, KY where we resided for almost 11 weeks while we worked at Amazon.  We got to know the surrounding areas, and came to appreciate the beauty of Kentucky, plus we met and became good friends with a number of people.  But even then we did not quite realize the value of extended stays in one place.

Then it was down to Cedar Key, FL where we stayed for 5 weeks really integrating ourselves into the community, and this is where we really learned to slow down and let life come at us......it is where we first became acquainted with Miss Serendipity, and her sidekick Mr. Jello.  We met some amazingly interesting people in Cedar Key, and developed friendships that have been renewed over and over again as we travel.......slowly.....from point to point.  That first 12 months we covered over 12,000 miles, and crossed the U.S. 3 times.....the last 17 months we have traveled just over 8,000 miles.

So, fast forwarding to the present, here we are in South Lake Tahoe for the summer.  Since I was a little kid I have wanted to spend the summer at Lake Tahoe.  When we first conceived the idea to spend the summer  here I had no idea what it would end up looking like, and frankly after just 11 days I still do not know how it will all turn out, but what I do know is that we are just letting life come at us, and not really doing any long term planning.  Whenever we get the chance to meet new people we embrace it.....we spend more time walking around exploring.  We don't know when we will start our jobs here at TVC.......the day is coming soon, I am sure.....but for the moment we are just enjoying "being" here.  This is the evolution most nomads experience.  I was just watching a video interview our friends Chris and Cherie, of Technomadia fame, did as part of their on going series called "Ramblings: Tales from Nomads" with Nina and Paul, whom we will meet in person for the first time when we travel to Cape Blanco Lighthouse in September.  While their background is different than ours, their evolving living life on the road in an RV parallels ours, and that of many others we have met along the way.  Click on this link to see their interview.

Tuesday I was invited on another MTB ride by Michelle D......she does a couple of rides each week with a few other ladies (Michelle M. and Jennifer in this case) who are all good riders.  I'm not used to being the only guy in a riding group, but in reality it still felt like riding with the "guys".  We did a 3.5 mile grinding climb up 8-12% grades to Angora Lake.  The ride started at just under 6,700' elevation and topped out at 7,450'.  There is a small resort on this tiny lake with several cabins, and a camp store.....apparently there is a 2-3 year waiting list to get into one of these cabins.  This is a place I would love to bring TLE for the afternoon.

Of course, after paying the price of the climb we had earned the reward of the downhill run back to the cars.....and what a run it was.  In all we rode for just under 2 hours and it was not even Noon yet.

I returned home thinking I would work on a few projects that have been sitting on my work bench since we arrived here in SLT, but ultimately had to admit that even though my conditioning is pretty good, I need more recovery time than I used to require, so I spent the afternoon napping, and reading.

TLE had me grill up some chicken asada purchased a couple of weeks ago at Trader Joe's in Carson City, and then we enjoyed Street Tacos Tuesday sitting outside whilst watching part of the Rangers and Canadiens hockey game, then part of the Spurs and Thunder basketball game while sitting by the fire.....the first fire we have had since we arrived in SLT.

Around 8:30 we went inside to watch a DVD movie I had bought a couple of months ago at a Walmart somewhere in Arizona, or Utah called "Source Code" which we actually enjoyed.  We liked the premise and the surprise ending.

Thanks for stopping by!