It all started with a notebook and a global pandemic.  I, probably like the rest of the world, was not prepared for what 2020 would turn out to be.  Suddenly homeschooling a third grader, kindergartener, and a two year old.  Tailspin about sums it up. My husband was no longer traveling internationally for work: hardstop there too.  My mother, on the other hand, was frantically adamant about, “NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY A TRAILER. NOW NOW NOW!” My mother, Grannie Annie, has been an avidly nomadic camper for decades.  In March 2020, she said, “Tash, you never know. Schools may not go back in the Fall.” I thought she was talking nonsense.  Of course they would!  “NOW NOW BUY A TRAILER NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!”  You know the saying, “be careful how you speak to your children because one day it will become their inner voice”…? Well, true to form, at night with my restless insomnia and my surging anxiety about the unknown and uncertainness of everything, I would hear, “NOW NOW NOW! Before its too late! NOW NOW NOW!” It was always in our family’s “ten year plan” to buy a trailer and see the world… and NOW was the time.  My husband sold his car, we scoured the internet.  The research was endless, but one thing that was imperative: Airstream, 27’, with the bed symmetrically placed in the front.  I have minor/major OCD about symmetry. We had been camping one time before, in retrospect, a very bold/insane camping trip: Two weeks, Eight campsites, Two Countries, Eight months pregnant with my third daughter.  What I learned from

that experience was _______.  So here we were, negotiating in the parking lot of some RV dealership with the salesman saying, “in 20 years I’ve never seen sales like this.” Of course you think, “gimmick”.  Oldest sales trick in the book: Scarcity. But, when you do your research and you research your research, cross check, fact check, verify… Grannie Annie and this Salesman were actually, kind of sounding, accurate? Could the world run out of RVs and Trailers? Well, in June 2021, airstreams are backordered until the end of 2022 and their sales went up a whopping 700% from pre-Covid to present day.  The word “prescient” comes to mind.  So here we are, three months into this new strange, locked down and scared world, with a trailer that we can barely back into the driveway without yelling at each other: “Six to three! Six to three! What are you doing??!!” “I don’t know what you’re talking about!!! Stop yelling numbers!” Then there was the learning curve of finding campsites, booking them - the LEAD TIME to book them, realizing you need FHU, realizing the weight of the trailer affects the drive time duration, realizing when you climb 8,000 feet of elevation it might drop 50*, realizing you might skate through an intersection completely jackknifed because your darling husband didn’t put snow chains on, realizing the importance of blue flashlights and fox urine and LED string lights.  What I have learned is this: Every time I go camping I learn something new.