Getting Ready for our Colorado Venture didn’t go as planned; but Arvel and I are reminded that “if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans!”

The unplanned life is really the only life we can live.  We don’t have a choice.  Life delivers us lessons on a daily basis and we never know what they are going to be.

It seems on a global scale, people are anxious and afraid because the “normalcy” has been ripped away from their lives.  We don’t know what is coming.  Nature is playing a big joke on us.  She is saying “I’m not telling you what is coming from one moment to the next.  I never did!  It was you who tried to plan and control your life so closely that you distracted yourself from what it really means to be alive!”

The day before we left Arvel got sick during the preparation stages of our journey.  It took him completely out of the game.  His first concern was “do I have a fever?”  You know, the Covid Scare!

After touching his forehead and feeling his cold, cool and clammy skin, I could tell there was no fever.  I felt he might be suffering from heat exhaustion and treated him as such.  He was feeling better in a couple hours and insisted on going back to our preparations.

It was one of those nights where I couldn’t sleep.  Maybe pre-journey jitters.  We were taking the Pop-up-Trailer on her maiden voyage and we had no idea how it was going to go.  I woke up way too early to get ready to go, after only three hours of sleep.  We hit the ground running without my usual tea and yoga.

With the amount of work it took to get the Pop-up, popped down and ready for the road, I told Arvel I was putting the trailer back on the market in the Spring.

Arvel attached his bike to the handy, dandy bike rack on the top of the Pop-up that was really a thing in its day (back in 1999.)  He was excited to bring his bike along.  But that excitement was thwarted when the bike fell off the top of the trailer right after we turned onto the Hwy only a couple blocks from the house.  He rode the bike back home and I figured out how to get the trailer turned around so I could head back and pick him up.

I had only pulled a trailer one time and it was a 5×8 U-Haul.  I was nervous and pulling the trailer up the hill from Camp Verde to Flagstaff was not an easy journey.  It was slow going and we had to watch the engine light to make sure it wasn’t overheating.  But surprisingly Red Raven (My Mini-Van) did a great job.

We had to make a stop in Flagstaff to pick something up and by this time I was fried.  Between nerves and lack of sleep I was not a happy camper.  Arvel and I were both in a high stress place and plummeted to the lower end of 3D.  Suddenly we understood why everybody is angry, upset and lashing out at each other.  I had to take a very long deep breath and just focus my attention on driving that trailer as far as I could before I spent the last of my energy.

We had a reservation at a campground in Pagosa Springs which was a 7.5 hour journey without stops.  We put many miles on the Van traversing through long stretches of hot desert before finally entering the beautiful forest groves that pulled us to Colorado.

We took turns driving with me driving the first half and Arvel the second.  We didn’t arrive to our Campground until 8pm Colorado time, just as the Office was closing.  Our site was less than ideal but the best I could do for a week booking less than a month out.  We knew we had to just accept what we were given and go to work setting up the trailer which we knew would be a project, potentially taking us a couple hours.  We haven’t quite figured out the twenty-minute routine yet.  Just leveling the trailer alone was nearly a half hour.  We ran around all sides with our little level trying to get the bubble right in the middle and this involved a lot of adjustments.

At the end of the day, we had a nice home and I thought “this isn’t so bad.”  Vacation is a lot of work.  But once we are set up, we can finally enjoy all the hard work.

One thing we realized is that moving the Pop Up as little as possible through the summer, is the best plan.  But then again.  God may not think so!

As I lay in our comfortable bed in the quiet of the night, cold air pouring in through our tent canvas, a thought came to me.  “We have to just love each other.”

We talk about how love is all there is, and how we need to choose love instead of fear.  But in the end, love is an action step.  We need to speak to each other respectfully and treat each other with dignity.  We need to take a lot of deep breaths, and hold our tongue when something wants to escape that is not a conscious act of love.

Relationships are not about how long you have been together, or whether you are married or not, or even how much you have in common.  In the end, relationships are about who we are in the moment and how we share ourselves in the moment with those in our orbit.

My new plan is to “Just be Loving.”  I think God will like this one!