They Gone (pt. 1 of 10)
*Dear Reader,
My last post was in February 2025 and as of this writing it is now almost July. I know that’s too long, but perhaps you’ll cut me some slack, as I do have a pretty good reason: I was getting sober, which I am presently writing about and will publish on that subject very soon. In the meantime, for your summer reading enjoyment, I’m publishing a series of travel writings I made during a two-week RV trip with my wife and friends to the American southwest in August of 2023 that I originally posted on my social media accounts but have been asked to repost here. There’s a few references to my drinking, which obviously do not represent my present-day lifestyle, but that I left in for historical accuracy and for comedic and literary effect. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoyed living them, and then writing them.
They Gone
Aug 9, 2023. OMG, dude-we’re doing it. Today was day one of a 13-day cross-country RV trip with my wife Sam, our good friends Kelly and Joe and their 10-year-old son, Booker in a 26-foot motorhome called The Jamboree. There’s five of us in this thing and we’re as giddy as wet puppies for the adventure ahead.
The trip began with tire issues before we even got out of town. This threatened to sour our anticipatory mood but the tire was soon fixed, we hit the road and I did what any sensible Gen X-er would do to remedy this situation: I turned the Bluetooth speaker up to eleven and played Let’s Go Crazy by Prince. Mood problem?….SOLVED. Looks like the 52-hour playlist I have been making for the last six months is already dispensing its medicine.
We started off on a six-hour drive to Louisville KY through mountainous terrain that Booker and I used productively by riffing on every variant lyric of “The Diarrhea Song”. We came up with some real doozies and I have a feeling we’re not done. We stayed at the house of our friends Jim and Hannah in Germantown, who took us to their neighborhood joint, Monnik Brewing, where they had frying down to an art form- even my salad was fried. A good night’s sleep, followed by a modest moist-towelette-bath in the tiny RV bathroom and now we are spanning four states in six hours to spend two days at Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park in Missouri. Stay tuned: considering the personalities on this journey and our full itinerary, it would not shock me if zany antics were to ensue. There’s your spoiler warning.