I think the worst thing you can do with an Airstream is to zoom across this amazing nation in an effort to cover miles quickly. Circumstances have forced me to do that on a few occasions, and each time I bemoan the missed opportunities along the way, the impromptu stops for roadside oddities and authentic experiences that fly past the driver’s window.

There’s always a good reason, of course. We have only so much time in this life and we can’t make more. It doesn’t matter if you are wealthy, esteemed, powerful, or famous—your day is still only 24 hours (until we have Airstreams on Mars), and your week is always going to be 7 days long.

Time is the key currency when you want to engage in slow travel. Like the “slow food” movement a few years back, I think you get a richer, more satisfying experience by roaming at leisure. The ideal way to get across the USA is to take a month or more with an Airstream, stopping everywhere that suits you and chasing 72 degrees whenever possible.

I’ve done that for a few years. Tallying up, I think I’ve crossed the country towing an Airstream roughly 35 times in the last 15 years, and most of those trips were happily puttering the blue highways at a rate of no more than 150 miles every few days.

So there I wuz … as the story often begins … storming the highways of the nation this past week in an effort to get home after four months of traveling. I could have delayed my arrival back home by two or three more weeks but I had been gone long enough.

I had spent enough of the currency of time on travel for a while. After a summer appreciating the humid northeast, I was ready to switch to the desert and dry out a little bit at home base.  Call it the Temptation Of The Heat. Tucson was calling, with friends and family awaiting amidst the final weeks of the stormy & hot desert monsoon season.

Putting in the miles is hard on humans after a few days, and the equipment takes a hit too. I’ve never managed to complete a sprint across the nation without some sort of mechanical price to pay. Tires wear out or fail, windshields crack, and in the winter things can freeze unexpectedly. Last year we had a window blow out in the home stretch through Phoenix. There’s always something, even for someone like me who is meticulous about maintenance and preparation.

On a slow trip this stuff is easy to deal with, but when stuff happens in a balls-out dash it’s much harder. There’s no margin in the plan. Even a small glitch can make you feel like an astronaut aboard Apollo 13: wondering how to patch up the ship and limp home.

This time I was fairly lucky. I drove 2,135 miles from western PA to Tucson AZ in five days and the worst thing to happen was a nail in a tire of the Mercedes GL in the final 300 miles. I was so close to home at that point (and the tire was still holding air moderately well) that I didn’t even take the time to do the smart thing, which would have been to unhitch the Airstream and bring the tow vehicle to the nearest tire shop. Instead I took the quick way out, which was to add some air with the compressor that is part of my contingency equipment and keep driving to Tucson with a close eye on the car’s dashboard tire pressure monitor.

(For the record, I don’t recommend this. Play it safe. I was a maniac this time.)

The Airstream and Mercedes arrived looking bedraggled, coated with a film of the unique chemical goop that our Interstates produce—a mixture of unburnt diesel oil, carbon, tire particulate, dust, fryer grease and samplings of bug guts from 14 states. It’s not a good look but a trip to any truck wash will bring the Airstream back to life.

To break up the week I took a short day on Wednesday and stopped in Oklahoma City to look up my friend Edgar Cruz. Edgar is a marvelous, internationally-recognized Spanish guitarist who has performed at many Aluma-events in Ohio, Oregon, and Arizona. He’s got that amazing ability to play any song that he can hear, and retain literally over a thousand complex guitar arrangements in his head. He’s also a genuinely nice guy.

This evening Edgar was scheduled to be playing in an smaller setting at the University’s Jazz Lab so it was a fun and intimate evening for everyone who showed up. He hung his phone on the mike stand and we all texted him song requests, making the show almost entirely audience-generated.

Beyond that pleasant evening lay only another 965 miles of concrete, which whisked by fairly painlessly thanks to the wide open highways of the west and their commensurate high speed limits. And now the Airstream is parked and mostly unloaded, awaiting a deep cleaning inside and out so that it can be ready for another trip soon.

What’s next?  Other than a short weekend in October, I don’t know. At this point in my life I’ve realized that it’s not really important to know what’s around the corner, and we’re only fooling ourselves if we really think we know. Years of traveling the highways and looking for new things has taught me that it is good enough to know that when I turn that corner, something will happen—and it will be alright. Until then, it’s just good to be home.

Yesterday and today have been full of mixed emotions for me. Being at Alumapalooza temporarily brought me back to a routine that has been part of my life for a decade, and for a while it felt like nothing had changed. I did many of the same things, met many of my old friends, visited places I’ve been to dozens of times. But all along I’ve known that it was the last time for many things, and it’s time to look forward to what’s next.

This is part of a tumultuous change that started for me when Emma turned 18. For the first time in 13 years there was Airstream travel without Emma. That changed a lot of things, as I documented in the blog last summer. Now everything is changing. It is the last Alumapalooza for me, at least as an organizer. This may be the last time I drive these roads and decompress (in the spot pictured above) with dear friends in early June. This year may be the last that I can be sure I will spend the whole summer in Vermont. I do not know what exactly the year 2020 will hold, but I am sure it will be very different.

For many people change is unsettling. They find comfort in routine and stability. I like a little routine but too much is dull and even scary to me. I suppose it might be considered a bit of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but I always want to know “what’s next?” In that way I share a philosophy with Wally Byam, the founder of Airstream, who wrote:

Don’t stop. Keep right on going. Hitch up your trailer and go to Canada or down to Old Mexico. Head for Europe, if you can afford it, or go to the Mardi Gras. Go someplace you’ve heard about, where you can fish or hunt or collect rocks or just look up at the sky. Find out what’s at the end of some country road. Go see what’s over the next hill, and the one after that, and the one after that.

I think of change and exploration as necessary for growth. If you own an Airstream you might share that philosophy. But the necessity of change is easy to acknowledge, and difficult to execute. To get there sometimes you have to prune away tradition and past commitments to make space for what’s yet to come—even when you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.

So when people ask me (as several people have in the past few days) “What do you plan to do with your free time now that you’re not doing Alumapalooza?” I don’t have a ready answer. The pat answer is that I plan to do more writing, but of exactly what I don’t know. I plan to do more traveling, but exactly where I cannot say. Perhaps north, perhaps south, or around the world. Some travel will be with the Airstream, and some without. One must simply take a step at a time and see what happens. I think the unknown factor is the exciting part.

Today’s travel has brought me from the Cleveland area to Verona Beach State Park in upstate New York. The drive itself was uninteresting but I am at least one step closer to a new set of adventures. I’m taking one night here, and another night in the Adirondacks tomorrow. After that, Vermont for a few weeks, and then we’ll see what happens next.

The road is long … too long sometimes. If you’ve read this blog over the past few years you know how I feel about long days on the Interstate. It’s soul-sapping—the exact opposite of what good travel should be. I didn’t get into Airstreaming so I could play at being a over-the-road truck driver, stopping for quick gas-and-goes, eating whatever is convenient, and listening to the shriek of tires on concrete rather than birds in the trees.

But sometimes this is the hand I deal myself. I really should have left Tucson a week earlier so that this could have been a leisurely trip, but it’s so beautiful in Tucson in April and early May that I can never bring myself to leave. The attraction of this season was particularly enchanting and fun, so I delayed as long as possible knowing that I’d pay a price later. The price is 50 hours of drive time, day after day, along less-than-inspiring roads

I vow that next year things will be different. But that’s a topic for another blog. This week I have searched for ways to spice up the trip and you may recall that I opted to add 200 miles to my route (and stay clear of major storms) by going to New Orleans instead of through Dallas and Hot Springs. This turned out to be a brilliant move, affording me one precious wonderful night in the city to break up an otherwise tedious run ever since I left Austin.

I parked the Airstream in Westwego (across the Mississippi river) at Bayou Segnette State Park, and immediately set the air conditioning to “deep freeze” all night in the hope of finally drying out the interior. This strategy worked wonderfully. By morning everything was restored to a normal state of crispness rather than Shrek’s Swamp, and I was no longer in danger of sprouting mushrooms from my ears.

While the Airstream was desiccating, I took the opportunity to go downtown and meet some friends who were just wrapping up work at a conference. We went out for dinner at Galliano’s (excellent) and of course the traditional late-night coffee and beignets with conversation at Cafe du Monde, because that’s what one does. I’ve been hitting that place every few years since my college days back in the [cough] early 1980s. In the past my visits were usually not before midnight, but these days I’m a bit older and I was looking forward to getting to bed.

In my defense, it had been a trying day on the road. A planned 3.5 hour drive from Lake Charles to New Orleans turned into a 7 hour drive thanks to a major accident on I-10. In my experience this sort of “Interstate parking lot” traffic jam is actually better with an Airstream in tow because you at least have access to food and a bathroom, should either of those needs arrive.

I was fine for the 2.5 hours we spent creeping along the Interstate but I was witness to a fellow who was not as fortunate. As I followed his car at 2 MPH, I observed as he dumped the contents of a full water bottle out the window, and then battled his way to the breakdown lane to use that water bottle as a repository, much like Howard Hughes in his later days. I was tempted to offer my bathroom to the poor fellow, but then traffic accelerated to a scalding 5 MPH and his parked econobox disappeared from the side view mirror. Given the extent of that traffic jam, he may still be there trying to get back into the line of cars…

As I mentioned, my weather-avoidance strategy worked wonderfully. While New Orleans was just as humid as everywhere else I’d been lately, the skies were blue with puffy white cumulus as I hitched up in the morning and towed up through Mississippi and into Alabama. I couldn’t ask for better conditions, and I was sort of on Cloud 9 myself. My goal for Tuesday was to log at least 325 miles, and I did easily, ending up at the charming Tannehill Ironworks Historic State Park off I-59.

I promised myself that I would pay for 30-amp power in order to keep the Airstream dry, and I did but I didn’t really need to. The humidity here, at least, had dropped to a tolerable level and the outside air was cool enough for comfortable sleeping.

Sadly, the repeated frequent days on the road had allowed a slight backup of work to accumulate. Rather than wandering the park on foot and getting some exercise I spent the balance of the afternoon and evening at my laptop. I don’t recommend this. A person really needs to do something besides sit all day, and give both the muscles and the eyes something fresh to do. With each day of 7-8 hours I find a small deterioration in my flexibility, stamina, and sense of well-being. Four or five days of that and I’m in danger of becoming a tumbleweed.

In my case I’ll have to recover once I get to Ohio. The detour to New Orleans sucked up any margin I had in the travel plan, so there’s nothing to be done but cover at least 320 miles each day until Thursday. I have to be in Dayton on Thursday to pick up Eleanor at the airport, in Troy OH to pick up printed materials that afternoon, and in Jackson Center shortly after to receive about 50 boxes of store inventory. There’s a long list of other pre-event tasks that must be accomplished over the weekend too. Once Monday arrives, there will be little opportunity for anything but Alumapalooza—which is not bad thing, because the event is fun.

One day left of towing … and then I park with a sigh of relief in the Terra Port at the Airstream factory for 11 days. I’ll try to update the blog daily once the event starts, but if it gets overwhelming, forgive me!