No Regrets: Adventuring Through Life

By Linda McDermott

No Regrets is a memoir of how a young girl navigates through midwestern expectations and manages to travel in all seven continents, including working twice in Antarctica. As she ages, walk with her as she gains inner strength and confidence to travel, and experience some of the quirky adventures which came her way in remote places as sh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Out There Again Books LLC
• Release date: Feb 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781732502710

Linda McDermott

Are you a speaker, entrepreneur or individual wanting to Tap Into Your Talent and Take The Next Step? Linda McDermott helps you make your speeches, your products or your life more energetic, more rewarding and more fun! She is a Creative Director, Public Speaking & Performance CoachApart from 'normal' coaching, Linda's interesting clients have engaged her for many things: bringing them up to standard to get paid over $20,000 for their keynote speech; creating a concept for a one-woman show; bringing an animated character to life to include in a keynote; writing headlines and article angles for free publicity; adding the fun-factor to writing, products or speeches; interviewing for promotional video clips; inspiring to dream bigger with personal projects.Linda has taken dance lovers’ tours to New York and run workshops with international dancers. She pitched her romantic comedy screenplay at the Los Angeles Screenwriting Expo. At the same event she was a top 10% scene-writing finalist in the CS Open.She wrote How to Get Free Publicity after promoting her dance tours to New York with zero advertising budget but plenty of motivation and creative thinking.After being inspired by a funny speaker she spent four years working out how they did it! As a result and wrote her little book '88 Ways To Tell Funnier Stories' for speakers, trainers, writers and people who want to have a laugh with friends.Linda's personal mission is to bring colour and laughter toher world - so that it enhances yours.

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No Regrets: Adventuring Through Life, a memoir by Linda McDermott

No Regrets: Adventuring Through Life

Out There Again Books, Tehachapi, CA

© 2018 Linda McDermott

All rights reserved. Published by Out There Again Books. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Editing and design by Indigo: Editing, Design, and More

Illustrations by James McDermott

ISBN: 978-1-7325027-1-0

For Helen, Aunt Bertie, my parents, and all free-spirited souls on the planet, including my friends and travel partners and, of course, my children.

Contents

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Epigraph

Chapter 1: First Big Adventure

Chapter 2: Costa Rica

Chapter 3: Mexico

Chapter 4: Dog Sledding I

Chapter 5: Dog Sledding II

Chapter 6: Spain

Chapter 7: Scotland

Chapter 8: Tour du Mont Blanc

Chapter 9: Dolomites

Chapter 10: Patagonia

Chapter 11: Peru

Chapter 12: Antarctica

Chapter 13: Fiji

Chapter 14: Nepal I

Chapter 15: Nepal I, Continued

Chapter 16: Bali

Chapter 17: Antarctica II

Chapter 18: Australia Alone

Chapter 19: Alaska—Driving the ALCAN

Chapter 20: Africa

Chapter 21: Greece

Chapter 22: Mongolia

Chapter 23: Nepal II and III

Chapter 24: Croatia

Chapter 25: Driving in Italy

Chapter 26: Spain—The Camino

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

Prologue

Originally my worldview, my universe, was very small—and I was very small in it. Rules, both spoken and unspoken, left me full of self-criticism and fear, which often led to avoiding risks and change. It has taken more than sixty years to soften the ever-present negative chatter in my head and to grow comfortable in my own skin. It didn’t come easily, getting out of my tiny universe, and sometimes I still crawl back toward it, darn it.

In the 1950s my vision of my future life was get married, have children, feed the husband, raise the children, and play bridge eternally during long afternoons with friends. I wanted to be as dependent on someone as my mom was on my dad. When I asked my mother once if she was Democrat or Republican, she replied, Well, I guess I’m Republican because that’s what your dad is.

This vision came from the culture of the Midwest, and from my family structure, something I didn’t recognize for a very long time. At a young age, while I gave the impression that I was happy and outgoing, inside a battle ensued. My mother offered me money to lose weight and to stop biting my fingernails, which translated into the message that I was fat and biting fingernails was unsightly. My eating disorders were born, and I never entirely stopped biting my fingernails.

I grew up in small-town Ohio, in a time-warped place, much like any rural place, USA. It was idyllic but held its own set of underlying problems: people swept problems under the rug without really dealing with them. Secrets abounded, as did people’s whispers about their friends’ actions that they deemed unacceptable. I adopted those standards too, and none of them prepared me for my future in the bigger world.

Then there was the chatter in my head. My negative mental voice would tell me, This is the way things are supposed to be, so accept it. Meanwhile, the other more positive and questioning voice would quietly tell me, Don’t listen to the ordinary. Rise above it—you can do it! I had to learn that when the negative chatter in my head started talking to me about my shortcomings, I needed to recognize it and deal with it.

The windows in my bedroom provided a view of an outside world, something beyond my small world in a house called home. I got the prettiest room, the one with curtained windows, which looked from my world to the streets and trees. My parents always wanted the best for me—their best for me. I was expected to succeed, by their standards, and I accepted their standards for a long time, but they never were natural to me. My bedroom was home to smudges of an after-Easter hard-boiled-egg fight with my brother, and to hiding places for my cooking mistakes such as fudge that would not harden.

My brother always got the last bedroom available. His windows didn’t reveal the outside world like mine did. He was younger, the boy, so I got the better room. In the summer evenings, we’d meet up with our neighborhood friends to play kick the can or hide-and-seek until our various mothers would call us in long after darkness fell. We’d be hot and sweaty in the summer heat.

Once in a while, my parents would abandon their instincts to protect me at all costs. One time, they let me sit on the back of an alligator at a Florida alligator farm. There was nothing to keep its mouth from opening and eating me. I was about ten. For my parents to allow that was not normal, though, and for all I know, the experience may have been what planted the adventure seed in me. For the most part, I was shielded from danger.

My youth was a time of incredible innocence and joy, with no relation to real life. As a child, I read fairy tales voraciously, and I wanted the Once upon a time, in a land far away, she/he/they lived happily ever after. I’ve been in search of happily ever after for a lifetime.

In the 1960s, as a teen, I prized a series of Margaret Keane prints I had of a little girl with huge, sad eyes. I remember my mother questioning me, Why do you like those pictures? They are so sad! I couldn’t really tell her why I liked them, but I knew I liked them for some reason. There was something in the eyes and dark picture that spoke to me, as if the picture described the real me and the way I thought about myself at the time. I was popular in school, but the true way I thought of myself was completely different from the external shell I showed everyone else. Outside, I appeared to be larger than life. Inside, I felt helpless, small, and stupid. It took a great deal of time for the two characters to catch up with each other and to reach peace.

My father decided it would be good for the family to see more of the western United States, so he planned a two-week trip when I was about twelve—a trip to California. In the 1950s, the only thing on my bucket list was newly opened Disneyland. I distinctly remember my mother telling me to announce that I was eleven years old at the ticket counter so I could get the child ticket price.

My father, with his engineering background, had booked every hotel or motel needed daily for the entire trip. It would all depend on no car trouble—and thankfully we didn’t have any. The trip was an immense success, except for my mother, who cried during most of a guided horse ride in Wyoming. She was used to a life of comfort, and all this was beyond her comfort level. The ride was too long for her, and she hurt all over. She took a long bath as soon as possible, trying to regroup for the rest of the trip. I gave her credit for trying.

It was during this trip that I not only developed a respect for what my father had accomplished by mailing checks to each motel or hotel, but I also vowed never to preplan anything to that extent. My love for traveling, and my ideas for how I would do it, started running around in my brain. I was still struggling with many expectations, mine and my parents’, but I knew I loved this kind of experience, the kind that had always waited outside my bedroom window.

The next trip out west wasn’t as successful. I was sixteen years old, very much in love with my boyfriend, and I didn’t want to be anywhere except in my small hometown in Ohio. To prove it, when my family and I stood gazing at amazing mountains in Wyoming, I said something terrible to my parents about not wanting to be there, and I ran into the unfamiliar forest. My hormones took over. My father ran after me, and we both returned safely. Reflecting, I think the beautiful mountains were enticing, an unknown world, but my need to be loved was at odds with the pull to explore the bigger world of the west. My parents, while they loved me, were not able to provide the warm and fuzzy environment I craved. Their love was often conditional: if I did this, then I would get that. Frequently I second-guessed what they were saying. But I didn’t have the skills and self-confidence to explore on my own yet, and the Midwest was known. As I ran toward the forest and its symbol of freedom, I simultaneously missed my safety nets.

I was expected to go to college, and I did after high school. Once there, I decided my major should be either home economics or teaching. In the mid-1960s, it wasn’t customary for women to have loftier goals than to be a teacher or homemaker. My college career was interrupted for about five years before I returned to college again. During one art class, I was given eight blocks of wood and told to do something with them. I stared at them, turned them over, and tried to see a bigger picture than eight small blocks of wood. Eventually I glued them together to make some shape, thinking I was doing well. The next day at class, I saw that some students had glued them and sanded them to make a ball, or drilled holes in them and joined them to make something interesting. Those students were discovering more than eight pieces of wood. I wanted to be able to do that also, to see possibilities, to leave my limited world behind and enter a universe of the unlimited.

But I still had the vision I’d been raised to pursue: marriage, children, work, card games with friends. Then life happened, and the vision I had been holding for so long shattered. It took even longer for me to actually embrace the change and say to myself: This is really a great thing because it has enlarged my world and allowed me to see beyond my cocoon, to see something that’s larger than me.

My mission over the years became to fight the limiting expectations I had been given. Heck, we all face our childhood demons in one way or another. As life passed, and hallmarks were reached, I embraced traveling. My way to break out of the mold I was given was to travel. And travel, I did.

It never was my intention to go to third-world countries. Even going to Massachusetts from Ohio was a shock to the system. I’m not sure I even knew that avocados or bagels existed until I was in my twenties and moved to California. Just by making the move to Boston and then Los Angeles, my world grew immensely in the early 1970s. I was beginning to see a bigger world than that of the Midwest. And with each new trip I took, my world grew and grew.

Still, I got lessons even when I was in my fifties about how I was supposed to behave. In the Midwest, the cultural habit is not to say what you really mean. This all led to second-guessing myself and not being secure with myself. Mom would ask me, Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable with your shirt tucked in? Interpretation: You look like a slob. Tuck in your shirt! Another example:

Me: What is that bag of peanuts for?

Mom: That’s for your brother.

Me: Are they from my bag?

Mom: Yes, I just gave him some from yours.

Silence. Finally I asked, Why did you give him my peanuts?

She: Because I don’t want you to get fat.

Message: You weigh too much now = I just want you to be perfect = you are not perfect as you are = the answer to a lot of my problems.

After I’d become a world-traveling adult, my mother advised me to relay my adventures to her once I returned, not before. She worried way too much to have that burden on my (or her) shoulders while en route to a third-world country, or even to a local camping trip or mountain climb. Although she was afraid for my safety, she was also proud of me. She told me once that a friend asked her, What’s that maverick granddaughter of yours up to these days? She would reply, "It’s not my granddaughter, it’s my daughter!" I think secretly she was not only proud of me but was also rooting for me, in her own way. A granddaughter was expected to be young and stupid, but a daughter in her fifties was not.

Note to self: Mom will never accept you for who you are. Rise above it, but accept her for who she is.

My dad, on the other hand, was more passive. When I would ask him, What do you think of this haircut? he would answer, Does my opinion really matter? If not, I’m not giving it.

Over the years I came to realize that paying attention to serendipity is important to me. It was serendipity that brought an answer to me in one of my many life searches. I boarded a bus that would take me to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to meet a friend for a Mozart concert. Next to me, a lady close to my age was wearing outrageous shoes for her age. I admired that about her. I said, I like your shoes! She smiled, turned toward me, then with a sparkle in her eyes, thanked me.

We continued our conversation awhile, and I mentioned my need/desire/goal of writing a book about my experiences. I had been toying with the idea of writing my experiences for years, and my children begged me to record them. I realized some of the outrageous experiences I’d had by this point in time were worth recording. Sometime later during the conversation, she revealed that she was a reviewer for the books featured in the Los Angeles Times.

Just write, she implored. She told me to write about what I know, the key to my independent nature. What started it all? she asked.

It took a long time for me to understand the importance of that question.

You are living the travel life that I fear.

—R. Schroeder, Friend of the Author

Chapter 1

First Big Adventure

When I mentioned traveling to my friend Barb, she immediately raised her eyes from her dinner at a local café, stunned. Oh, I don’t know, Linda was her first response.

The idea was to take five months off work in the mid-1980s, giving up the apartment we shared and traveling around the country in a converted van—and it was crazy. I’d considered the idea of a long van trip for several years as my children were growing, and the idea had simmered so long, I couldn’t stand it anymore. It wouldn’t be an easy undertaking, and it was decidedly a huge unknown, but the possibilities for adventure were endless. I just had to convince Barb and Rosie, our dog, to go with us—but Rosie needed no convincing, of course.

Aunt Bertie—or as I called her as a child, Aunt Birdie—would be proud of my decision. She had been my favorite aunt, the one who got her nickname from the parakeet she sent me in the mail. The cage fared better than the parakeet did in the postal service. At Christmas, my brother and I always saved Aunt Bertie’s gift boxes for last because she traveled all over the world and had very exotic things to give us. One year it was a hand-carved German nutcracker (it actually worked), and other times we got small dolls from foreign lands like Egypt and Turkey (I didn’t understand their head coverings at the time). Aunt Bertie never married or had children even though men lined up to date her and she’d gotten many offers of marriage. It was hard to ignore her presence. She talked easily to everyone she encountered, as if she had known them for years, and her dark-brown hair spoke volumes when she brushed it away from her face. You just knew she was one of a kind and could talk with anyone, including the king of a foreign country.

Aunt Bertie taught elementary school on military bases in countries including Japan and Greece. During her time off, she traveled all over Europe and other foreign countries whenever she could. She never seemed to have a care in the world, and whenever she came to our house, she blew in like a tornado. My mother was usually upset whenever Aunt Bertie came because she would show up out of the blue, with no warning.

Aunt Bertie was the one who let me try cigarettes at the young age of ten, the one who would encourage me to go on snake hunts with her and my brother. Her boundaries were nonexistent, and I could talk her into doing anything I wanted. My brother and I loved it when she would come to visit because she would do things like take us to a dirt road and let us drive the family car. Aunt Bertie was the person I wanted to become, even though I didn’t have a clue how to get from where I was to where her larger-than-life persona existed. Already the conflicting values were mounting.

Note to self: Huge influence here. Pay attention.

While Aunt Bertie was one of the first to influence me to look beyond my Midwestern life, she was certainly not the only one. As an adult, I moved to Los Angeles and worked at a local bank, where I grew close to my supervisor, Helen. She was as old as my mother, and I considered her to be my Los Angeles mom. As kind a soul as they come, she was never one to step on anyone’s toes or to upset anyone. She had never married because the man she was in love with had died in World War II. The pain of that experience was so deep that she never fell in love again. Helen and her sister, who also had never married, lived together for a long time.

After she retired, it was easy for me to see that Helen was getting older and more frail. I would take her out to dinner or lunch when I carved out the time from my work schedule. She relished any time I could give her.

Once, at dinner, I asked her, What should I learn from you? What would you tell someone new to the planet?

She raised her eyes to the ceiling and thought for a minute. Then she lowered her eyes and said, "Don’t have any regrets. That’s it. Just don’t have regrets." I think she said that because she did have regrets. She loved to travel and had recounted to me every day of every trip she ever took. Her trips were all in the Southwest, mainly because she had never flown on an airplane.

Note to self: Never forget those words. No regrets. Follow Aunt Bertie’s footprints and Helen’s advice imprinted indelibly on your brain, and have no regrets for your time on the planet.

When I finally convinced Barb that our trip would be the experience of a lifetime, we decided to take back roads, those roads that wouldn’t involve highway traffic and interstate driving. We read William Least Heat-Moon’s bestseller Blue Highways as a guidebook for what we wanted to do. He suggested stopping at restaurants only if they had three or more calendars posted somewhere in the restaurant. His book implied that restaurants with many calendars were generally dives that were hidden gems. We generally planned not to stop at restaurants at all because of the expense. Those restaurants we would stop at, we promised, would have at least three calendars on the walls.

While Barb and I had gone on many weeklong adventures including backpacking and camping trips with and without my children, this five-month van trip was a plan off the map. Like nothing any of my friends—or heck, anyone I knew—had attempted. Why us, now? I couldn’t stop thinking about how the past eighteen years had gone so very differently than I’d imagined they would.

In my late 30’s, I remembered a day that should have been my most glorious, eighteen years earlier. It should have been a life-changing, defining moment in my life, and it was—but not in the way I thought it would be. I recalled coming home with my new baby, only a few days old. In those ancient days, new mothers stayed in the hospital for several days to recover from the ups and downs of childbirth. Because of obligations of my family members, a friend picked me up from the hospital and brought me home with my daughter.

At the front door, my friend asked if I was all right, clearly not wanting to come inside. I said yes and more or less gave him permission to leave. I remember opening the door to a very sparse but adequate apartment. It seemed so very cold, with its squares of vinyl on the floor and the limited furniture from the thrift store. No one was there but my baby and me.

This wasn’t the happy occasion I had imagined. My fairy-tale brain had envisioned many family members and friends welcoming me and the new little life, someone offering me a cup of tea and a comfortable place to sit, plus continuous awwws over the baby. None of that existed on this day, one of the most important days of my life. There was only silence in the cold apartment.

I let the feelings envelop me, the whiteness and silence, the absence of anyone but the two souls in the room, the bursting of my fairy-tale imagery, and the fear that was creeping into my brain. I was tired, and I couldn’t sit anywhere because of hemorrhoids. I was hungry, and I held a brand-new baby in my arms.

For years before that first big road trip, that scene had played over and over in my mind, and it still does. I’ve finally come to understand why it is so imprinted on my brain: It was the first time I truly understood that I was alone in the world—that the only person I could count on to make sure I landed on my feet was me. Then I had a little baby who depended on me to land on my feet also. I had to learn quickly to be strong for both of us.

I gently laid my little sleeping girl in her crib. Then I lay on the large bed beside her and started crying, only a little at first until huge swells of sobbing started. I was finally forced to acknowledge that I was not Cinderella and to let that fairy-tale image fade away. No one was there to watch my back, to make sure I had a soft place to land, to help me. It was then that I began to toughen my skin.

Note to self: Take care of yourself instead of expecting your knight in shining armor on a white horse. Appropriately, your daughter’s name is Vanessa, butterfly in Greek. You will both emerge from your personal chrysalis stages and spread your wings.

A week before Barb and I started the trip, we had just taken my precious daughter to settle into her dorm—and the rest of college life. It felt as if I had done my job. I had raised her, and it was okay to give myself permission to take a short break. I’d spent almost twenty years making choices in regard to other people—whether partners, bosses, or children—and now I needed a break. I knew Aunt Bertie would agree. For now, I could see the country. We’d see how that went and then move on to the world.

My young son was with his father, and I trusted that he would be all right during this time. I promised to communicate constantly. When I returned, he would be my priority once again.

Barb and I were both scared and excited at the same time. To quit our jobs and take off in our thirties, knowing we would have to return to work for many more years after this trip, was an oddball thing to do. It took convincing for both of us, but gaining the courage to do it was amazing.

We started out in September, meaning that we’d be traveling in winter in the northern part of the country. We didn’t know it yet, but this meant we would have three snowstorms in Wyoming in September and would be camping behind a city library in subzero temperatures in Vermont, but we were prepared for it—kind of.

It was about four weeks after the trip had started that we took our first showers in Brookings, South Dakota. We’d pulled into a park area with a bathroom. Finding things to explore was always at the top of my list because of my curiosity. I walked into the bathroom to find a shower in the totally concrete building. This meant that wherever our feet would touch the floor, they would be cold. Because it was late September, it was darn right cold outside and inside, so we had to weigh the advantages of a free shower versus the cold temperature. The need for a shower won, and we prayed for warm water. I was able to shower first, and I promised Barb that I would be quick so she would have warm water also. It all worked fairly well. At least we didn’t smell anymore.

We wove along the blue highways to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in October. We were becoming brazen enough to wash our hair in gas station restrooms, ignoring the station attendants’ stares when we came from the bathrooms with our hair dripping or wrapped in a towel. Luckily we had just washed our hair before we saw a sign that read Fish Fry at the American Legion.

It was a Friday night in the Midwest, so finding a fish fry was not uncommon. I pointed the sign out to Barb, and we decided to follow it to see where the event was being held. We pulled into a dirt parking lot lined with trucks and older vehicles plus a small wooden building at the far end. So far, it seemed fairly harmless. There were people standing outside because the line was so long to get inside the wooden structure. We finally spied a sign that said $5.00, so we figured that was the cost of the meal.

We got in line and slowly advanced to the long table that held a variety of dishes. While in line, I expected to remain anonymous and not have conversation. From my youth, I remembered that unless you knew the people in the area, in general, people didn’t talk with new people until they felt comfortable with them. That was just the Midwestern way.

When we got to the table, I saw not only huge trays of fried fish but also corn, potato salad, coleslaw, fries, pies, and everything else in between—like the Midwestern meals I was used to. We filled our paper plates and decided to sit at the far end of a long table with a vinyl tablecloth near the pine-paneled wall. One by one or two by two, other people sat beside us with their friends, and quickly the table was filled with about twelve people dressed in cotton dresses or casual jeans and flannel shirts. These locals all knew each other, and the conversation centered on so-and-so being sick, another so-and-so’s crops not coming in very well, and so-and-so’s grandson getting into trouble again. It was all polite conversation, with little of substance revealed about anyone’s life.

I sat there and then began to eat slowly. Barb did the same thing.

As we ate, I glanced up from time to time to see people look away from us when our eyes met. We were dressed in used clothes, but we didn’t smell badly, to the best of my knowledge. Barb and I were never addressed, and we used that as an excuse to say nothing. I mean, we said nothing to our neighbors at the table during our whole dinner. In response to our silence, they said nothing to us. We were outsiders—we didn’t invite conversation because we were too scared, and they probably didn’t know what to do with two hippies in their midst. We didn’t look like off-the-wall hippies, just girls in jeans and flannel shirts who, maybe, were up to no good. The entire meal seemed to last an eternity, even though every bite was homemade and absolutely delicious. When we finished, Barb and I stood up, nodded to indicate silently that we were leaving, smiled at our anonymous companions, and left quickly.

I felt uncomfortable with the whole situation and thought about the fact that I had let my fear and insecurity get in the way of hearing the stories of the area directly from the people who lived there. At some point during the night, I made a decision: I would never let an amazing situation like that escape again. I would never again be silent, not smile, not invite conversation, or miss an opportunity to find out who the people of the area are and what makes them tick. I may never get to know their innermost thoughts, but I would know how they dealt with strangers.

It is my nature to talk with people and to put my vulnerable self out there for others to see so they also feel comfortable to let themselves be known. I needed to unwrap my skin a bit, like the layers of an onion. I had always equated people who were afraid to let their true selves be seen with an unpeeled onion. But looking back on that dinner, I realized maybe I was closer to an onion than I was able to admit. I needed to look at myself closer. And I probably needed to let my Midwestern inbred culture go.

A week before, in upper Minnesota, we’d had amazing colors of fall. We’d also encountered trouble. Not much in the category of trouble happened on the entire trip, but upper Minnesota was a problem. Because we were traveling in late fall, it was getting colder. It also meant that fewer people were traveling at this point, and we would find ourselves camping alone a lot of the time. Apparently when we were examining a spot in a national forest campground to camp for that night, somebody saw us.

We were in bed by nine, having chosen a site that was well sheltered on three sides around our van. At ten p.m., car lights shone through the van curtains. We were the only ones camped at the campground. Two other factors played into the scene quickly: it was a weekend night, which meant drinking on Friday or Saturday nights and getting into mischief was a likely pastime for locals, and we had pulled straight into our site, with the three sides of shelter now feeling like barricades. The only way we could get out was to back up.

Our eyes were glued on the lights coming in the back window, and we parted the curtains a bit. The car with the lights came closer, and before we could do anything, it had stopped behind us, shining the lights inside our van and blocking any exit. Rosie did nothing. Neither did we.

We had decided not to bring a weapon on the trip, figuring we would probably be hurt more with it than we would hurt someone else. The only things we had were our wits and a wimpy dog.

Two men got out of the car and came to where we could see them in front of the van. By this point, I was in the driver’s seat and Barb was in the passenger seat. We just wanted to leave. The men, however, wanted something else. They demanded that we open our doors and show our faces. As long as they had shotguns in their hands, we weren’t going anywhere. And, I thought, they appeared drunk.

The two men told us we were there illegally, that the Sierra Corp didn’t allow camping. We yelled back (windows and doors unopened), that we had stopped at the ranger office and were told it was all right. Additionally, we didn’t know any Sierra Corp organization. My heart was in my throat. I was trying to think my way through this mess. The conversation went on for a while, but we didn’t back down. It must have been ten minutes when all this happened, but it seemed like an eternity to me.

Eventually another set of headlights appeared at the entrance to the campground. OK, universe, my prayers have been heard, I thought. The headlights came closer to the van, and mercifully the men got back into their car and pulled away, no longer blocking us in.

I quickly put the car into reverse, stepped on the gasoline, and headed out through the trees to the main road as fast as I dared. By this time both Barb and I were sobbing and didn’t know what to do. I kept driving. We made it into town after about fifteen minutes, where I searched for the sheriff’s office. Once we found it, we told our story to an officer, between sobs, until he shrugged and said we could park in the back lot near the station for the rest of the night if we wanted. We really wanted acknowledgment and sympathy, but we settled for the safe place for the rest of the night, promising ourselves we’d be more careful about where we stayed on weekends. I chalked this up to being a character-strengthening lesson I apparently needed.

We progressed from Minnesota to upper Michigan and then down to Cincinnati, Ohio, where the weather was warmer and the woods were hopefully not as isolated. Going through Kentucky was warmer yet, although wetter also. One of our trip objectives from the beginning was not to pay for campsites so our money would last. In Kentucky, we pulled into a wet, misty national forest campground with almost manicured campsites. It was unusual to find such well-kept sites in a free campground. There were even a few split logs there at the campsites, so we were able to start a fire and cook our potato-and-onion meal in our cast-iron Dutch oven. It wasn’t long before a man in a camouflage shirt and pants started to approach us. He asked if the dog was friendly.

Maybe was my reply. Rosie started to growl. My thoughts of the Minnesota experience flooded in, but the lost Michigan opportunity trickled in too. The Michigan event won, and I started talking with the fellow. Barb and I relaxed when we understood him to be just a fellow who wanted to talk with Californians for a spell. We were in the South now.

The next morning when we looked out of the van, two men were sitting with rakes on a picnic table at the next site over, but were obviously not camping there, and we didn’t know what to do. With the gloom of the rainy day and the Minnesota experience fresh in our minds, we conjured all kinds of scenarios about who they were and what they wanted, and I figured all this was just another test of my intuition. I finally decided I would take our pee pot that we had used the night before to the bathroom to dump it. I walked out of the van with a determined gait, piss pot in hand, and made my way toward the outhouse. One of the men yelled out, Got lunch for me there? I started laughing, and so did he. It was kind of disarming.

I couldn’t help but talk with them after I poured out the pot. They remained at the table, and I found out that they were local workers employed by the US Forest Service to keep the campgrounds clean and well managed. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: locals got jobs, and the Forest Service got manicured campsites. I complimented them on their fine job, and they commented on our California license plates. I told them, No, we’re not lost. We’re really from California. I later sent one of them a California license plate once I got back home, and another friendship was cemented. I was peeling my onion skin, little by little.

I don’t want to stay in the middle of nowhere again tonight. It’s the weekend, I was explaining to Barb. I agree, she said. We were still in Kentucky, en route to the Deep South. We decided to stay in a well-known and hopefully populated place whenever we could on Friday and Saturday nights.

We stopped at a local Forest Service office in one of the small towns we were traveling through. I asked, We’d like to stay somewhere in our RV for the weekend, someplace safe…and not expensive, I added.

The fellow behind the desk thought for a minute. He then said, You know, you might think about going on down to the marina a few miles down the road. There’s a fellow taking care of things there, he continued, and I think you could probably park there for free. I think his name is Rick.

Bonanza, I was thinking.

We tootled off down the road in high spirits. After several of our other adventures, this would be a blessing.

It didn’t take long to see a sign pointing to a public marina on a road leading to a large lake. Two things Kentucky has are water and lakes. We pulled into a spot, and it wasn’t long before a man started approaching us. He came slowly, walking as if something were hurting him a bit, but obviously heading toward our Ford van.

When he got to the van, I said, Hey there!

He nodded his head and then said, Hello! How are you doing?

We explained that we needed a safe place to camp for two nights; we wouldn’t bother anyone and would not leave any trash around. Rick really didn’t care about any of that. Matter of fact, he was just glad to have company. It was late fall and no one was around, so he was happy to have someone to talk with. He showed us pocketknives that he had found in the reservoir. It was obvious that he was proud of his finds. I told him I would be making some biscuits later in the afternoon, and if he came back, I would give him some.

We went our separate ways, and I got out my Bundt pan to make biscuits for dinner. I took out my mother’s old biscuit recipe and then found the flour, baking powder, and other supplies I needed to put everything together. The Bundt pan fit nicely on a burner that slowly baked the biscuits.

Just about the time I was ready to take the biscuits off the stove, I saw Rick coming up the road. We were camped in a flat spot with a few trees and a road leading down toward the water of the marina.

He came up to talk a bit more about life in the marina. He explained that he ensured the few boats in the docks were safe and how people come down for the weekend to play and to fish. I took the biscuits off the stove and pulled off the lid to show them to him. He stared at them with big eyes. I asked him if he still wanted some, and he said, Of course!

I took a spoon and scooped two large biscuits out of the pan, wrapped them carefully in a paper towel, and then handed them to Rick. He looked at them, smelled them, then stuffed them in his back jeans pocket, both in one pocket, and wandered off. My amazing, fluffy, made-in-a-van biscuits were being squished to the size of cardboard in the back pocket