There and Back Again
A six week trek, odyssey, and adventure starring Sam, Gwen, Marcy and Dave.
Journal by Dave LeLacheur
6/23/2011. It was all begun as something of a lark. About two months ago, Marcy was coming down the home stretch of her master's in counseling psychology program; she was extremely busy, working day and night, a pace which would last into the second week of May. Somewhere in that hectic period, one of us jokingly raised the idea of all four of us going on a cross-country voyage. We'd considered it a Good Idea from long ago; on the strength of Marcy's two such extended vacations when she was young (which occurred when she was 2 and 12, I believe), the notion had long ago slipped unassumingly into our pantheon of Good Ideas, where it had remained comfortably uninspected ever since.
Like most such Good Ideas -- we all have them; some of my others include vacationing to Machu Picchu, hiring out a real castle in England or France to live in for a month, or participating in a (and perhaps even organizing) "Wooster and Jeeves" themed weekend for adults, allowing one to soak in the Wodehousian atmosphere in a country estate, served by a brilliant, if temperamental, French chef, while the largest concerns of the day would be how to steal a policeman's hat, or how much to wager on the local children's three-legged race -- like most of these, I had no real expectation that it would actually happen. Is not the main point of such fantasies the reveling in the imaginative flight of "What if...?"
And yet the seed evidently had some roots about it, for much to my surprise, those careless conversations took hold of me. The question that, once asked, could not be answered was simply: "If not now, when?" It could be answered, of course, but that answer would simply and finally be "Never." I think that is what won me over: I was not prepared to accept "Never" as a final verdict and close down this Good Idea forever.
The planning had one ally in my mind: a prior commitment for myself. Last fall, I had agreed to meet up in Wichita, Kansas, for ~10 days of playing World in Flames with two German friends, at Eric's home. The group of us had played three years in a row at EuroWiFCON in October in Germany, but none of us were going to be able to go in 2011. When Karsten and Michael proposed to come to the states this summer instead, my reason for not going -- a financial one -- was greatly ameliorated, so I agreed. For much of the several months since committing, I had been uneasy about the decision. It's all well and good that I was taking some time off after the prior work with CareerLeader had ended; even I, with my famously poor ability to see what I needed, recognized that I needed rest. I was emotionally, morally, and physically exhausted from the last several years. So puttering around for a growing number of months did not trouble me strategically (although at a more tactical level, the one-way flow of money was always worrisome). But the notion of taking a vacation, a personal vacation away from the family at that, in the midst of a period of not working seemed more than a little self-indulgent.
The trip beautifully erased all such feelings. The cost of getting to Wichita was halved (I will have to take a train from Gallup, AZ, while the others saunter through Colorado for a week before catching up with me), and while I am playing, so will Sam, Gwen, and Marcy be playing too. A bold stroke; guilt erased. And while the cash flow worries remain (and indeed have been accelerated by this trip), it is also true that the fact of going away galvanized me to take some job-like actions which may have set some good things in motion in that realm as well.
The morning progresses here in Poplar Grove, Illinois, where we are staying one night at Marcy's Uncle Barry and Aunt Maryanne's lovely house enfolded by a golf course, so I will wrap up today's writing with a quick synopsis of the first two days. 6/21, Tuesday, was the last day of school, and the first day of the trip. A couple of intense weeks of planning, plotting, and logisticing had gotten us as ready as possible. Emotions were running high, especially for Sam and Gwen, who only once had been away from home for more than a week (that was a two week jaunt to Florida, including a few days at Disney World and visiting both sets of grandparents, which tended to minimize the away-from-home feelings), and were now keenly aware that they were going to be vagabonds for a month and a half. Gwen got a little manic, but her excitement was still ahead of her fears. Sam tends to feel his fears in advance, and on the final days before going, his excitement was surpassed by a collection of feelings, partly concerns over the vacation, but also supplemented and extended by the end of the school year (which he loved unreservedly; in fact we delayed the trip several days to honor his wish to complete his year of perfect attendance), the fact that several schoolmates, notably Will, one of his best friends, were moving away, and most of all that he'd been away from all of his friends for a long time.
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