Turning into Team Toto began with a trip to California, and some crackers.
My undoing, on some level
I was down there to help out my family. Mom & Pop were in hospitals and nursing homes. My brother and his wife were helping them, but they needed help, too, so I went down to see if I could get in the way. (I did!). To keep costs down I stayed at my parents’ rented home in a retirement community outside of Sacramento. I’ll never forget that trundle bed, but that’s another story.
I took a laptop and got some work done, and I did a lot of stuff to help the family, and I acquired stress. Oh, and my brother came down with pneumonia, so I guess he got hold of some stress, too. We all survived, but there I was, alone much of the time, missing Sooz and Tyler and Wally and having the stress and also having too much time to think.
Aging parents will do this to you — make you think, I mean. I was thinking that I’d better make sure to have lots of fun while I’m still spry enough, healthy enough to do so. That reminded me that I had scheduled fun for the coming summer months — a camping trip in the San Juan Islands — and that I still needed to arrange renting a pop-up trailer for that outing.
I searched. I called. I emailed. And what I learned is that, in my neck of the woods, there weren’t many rentals available. And those that were seemed to available only from sketchy outfits. (This may have been just poor sleuthing on my part — my apologies to any fabulous pop-up tent trailer rental businesses in the Puget Sound region, if you exist).
Then I started wondering about buying. Crazy? Sure. We hadn’t been camping in a few years, and those were tent-camping experiences, and what if we didn’t even like it? Crazy to buy a pop-up trailer, which I figured we could pull behind my 10-year-old Mazda Tribute, but… then… I found these crackers in my parents’ kitchen.
They looked kind of gross to me. Who wants tangy tomato flavor on a cracker? But they were the only crackers in the house, so I tried ’em.
Yum.
So — and remember, there was too much time for thinking here, and it wasn’t necessarily Quality Thinking — I deduced that I should pursue adventure at every turn. Look how well the cracker thing turned out!
Now all I had to do was convince Sooz. How could I do that? Ah. I would get her to look at pop-up trailers with me! At RV shows! It would be fun!
But first, I finished eating the crackers.
Sharing is caring!
Following is daring.