American Dream Traders: Greetings from the Confederacy!

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Greetings from the Confederacy!

In the brief time we've spent in Alabama I've begun to wonder if an entire portion of the population here failed to get the memo that the Civil War is indeed over (I'm not even getting into who won and who lost!!!!...shhh). Yesterday the boys and I took a trip out to Dauphin Island off the coast of Mobile and were really blown away to see so many Confederate (Dixie, rebel..whatever!) flags flying. Now, being somewhat aware of the world around me, I do know the controversy over the flying of this flag, but to actually see it in such ABUNDANCE gave me the heebeegeebies. Maybe the memo is coming in the mail....

Out on Daupin Island we visited the Alabama marine biology lab's Estuarium, a very compact yet informative aquarium-ish facility. We then visited Fort Gaines, a Confederate fort that played a role in one of the Civil War's most famous battles (the Confederates lost, btw). The boys really enjoyed the canons, the magazine and particularly loved seeing the latrine which consisted of 10 holes in a row. It made our RV facilities seem like the Ritz. Dauphin Island itself was interesting. After coming from the very touristy, glitzy, BUSY panhandle of Florida it seemed very laid-back and almost forgotten. If you go, don't go hungry. We had a very hard time finding something to eat and ended up having a lunch of slim Jims and Funyuns. The kids were thrilled and I felt like I was going to throw up when all was said and done!

Today we spent the day in Mobile. The big draw for us was The Body exhibit at the Gulf Coast Exploreum. This is the exhibit that features actual plastinated human specimens. We have wanted to see it since we first heard about it and were glad, for the most part, that we did. I say for the most part because Gabriel stressed his way through the entire thing. He kept saying, "I wonder why my stomach hurts so much?" At first I thought maybe it was the tuna sandwich he had for lunch, but then it hit Mother of the Year (another self-awarded title)-THIS CHILD IS STRESSED OUT BY THIS EXHIBIT! DUH. Anyhoo, once I figured that out we pretty much picked up the pace, DEFINITELY skipped the section on reproduction (that probably would have pushed him right over the edge) and wrapped up our time with the dead bodies. I personally found it fascinating and very tastefully done. I have read about the 20/20 expo saying that some of the bodies may be executed Chinese prisoners. However, the founder of these exhibits now SWEARS (yeah, okey dokey) that the current specimens are from Europe and willingly donated their bodies. At any rate, it was cool.

Having worked up an appetite (peeled, dissescted and plastinated bodies will do that to you, no?) we headed over to Wintzell's Oyster House on Dauphin Street for some Happy Hour half priced raw bar (or nude oysters as Mr. Wintzell liked to call them) and dinner. The place has been around since the 1930's and is a trip. The walls are completely covered with J. Oliver Wintzells many sayings. My favorite: "Some of the deepest footprints in the sands of time were left by heels." We had an awesome waiter who told us in no uncertain terms to skip the etouffe until we get to New Orleans and order the gumbo instead. Mike had the gumbo and loved it-I'm not a an okra fan. I had the crab soup (hint of sherry)and the fried green tomatoes with crawfish sauce. I could have just eaten the sauce-fantastic! The kids menu was great and they comped them each an ice cream for being such good eaters.

We then went home and watched American Idol. Some things are the same, even on the road. Sometimes the best part of the day is doing something ordinary in an out of the ordinary situation.

P.S. We stayed at Shady Acres RV park just outside of Mobile and right off I-10. While this park is basically a trailer park and quite run down, I would recommend it for 2 reasons. Firstly, the owner Charlie Siebert is a lovely man. He not only stayed late to greet us, but then personally walked us to our site and made sure we were okay. He gave us many suggestionsof things to do and even came over the next morning to see how we were doing and to recommend Wintzells for lunch. Secondly, the location was perfect and very central to Mobile's attractions.

Our Story

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost
Bilbo Baggins, in The Lord of the Rings

We are a family of five living in a motor home and are traveling the country for the foreseeable future.

As recently as last December, I never once imagined I’d be writing those words and by no means had I ever dreamed we’d be living this lifestyle. We sold our comfortable home in Orlando, Florida, discarded, sold or stored our possessions and purchased our new home, a Fleetwood Bounder. We left suburbia with all that way of life entails and set out on a journey of exploration, both geographically and spiritually Our story, at least this part of it, is not unique. In fact, there are countless American families living this roving, nomadic lifestyle in search of adventure and answers to any number of questions. There are many who, like us, have traded in one version of the American dream for a new, better-fitting one. The exceptionality of our tale lies in our back story.

I met my husband Mike in Cairo, Egypt. That sentence usually elicits one of two responses. People either mumble a non-committal “Hmmm…Interesting…” and abruptly move on to discussions of Great Aunt Ethel’s colonoscopy results or, alternatively and far more rarely, show interest in our story. I’ve never really figured out why our history causes apparent unease in so many people. Perhaps it’s because we so flagrantly don’t fit the mold of the “How We Met’ story that every American couple must tell over and over again. There it is, though, the beginning thread of OUR STORY. We didn’t follow the blueprint from the get go.

We both moved to Egypt from our respective homes in the US as teenagers. In a sense we were migrants, moving as a direct consequence of our parents’ careers. Mike was born and raised in Ogden, Utah and I grew up in a small town in rural Maine that no one has ever heard of. We met, of all places in an ancient city of Pharaonic ruins, grand mosques and colorful bazaars, at the American softball field. On a quasi-“blind date” I ordered a cheeseburger from Mike who was manning the concession stand and we’ve pretty much been a team since then. In the course of our marriage we’ve lived in Egypt, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Florida, Virginia, and traveled the world in the process. We’ve had the usual bumps, bruises, highs and lows that a two- decade- long relationship would be expected to have. We have produced three beautiful little boys, have made all the requisite home/car purchases and have moved our family in a directionally correct path toward “success”. We’ve done all of this against the backdrop of an internationally- mobile lifestyle. We are American by birth and by upbringing and, most definitely by privilege and choice, but we are also citizens of the world, unrooted and untethered.

The issue of rootedness has become, over the years, a key one for us. Where are we from? Where do we belong? Where is our place in the world? As a child in Egypt I saw myself for a time as a victim, pitilessly ripped by my parents from my home in Maine. It was not until I returned to US during college for a semester of study that I realized what “home” had become. I had returned to my home in the US to encounter a relatively unknown culture. It mystified me that I longed to return to the familiarity of Egypt. Hey, I was an American for crying out loud??!! I realized then that I would probably never feel entirely rooted in either culture. Mike and I were a match made in heaven in this regard. He, like me, had moved to Egypt under similar ‘duress” only realizing at a later date the great gifts he had been given . We were and I suppose always will be Third Culture Kids, a term coined to refer to those of us who have spent a significant period of time in one or more cultures other than our own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and our own birth cultures, into a third culture. We were not rooted or entrenched in a particular place, but instead felt at home most anywhere in the world. This, like most of life, is a double edged sword having both positive and negative attributes and consequences. Restlessness, it seems, walks hand in hand with rootlessness. This makes “settling down” a difficult prospect, but we knew that was what we were expected to do, so we made every effort.

While living overseas and shortly after having our first child we decided that it was time to go “home” and be American. Mike and I picked out the perfect ready-made neighborhood in-a-box in northern Virginia and purchased from a colorful brochure a not-yet-built house on a not-yet-created cul de sac. When all was completed we had a third of an acre, neighbors with multitudes of children, 2 brand new cars in the pristine garage and a mortgage just about the size of Nebraska. We even got a puppy. Now this was living La Vida American! But somehow our life felt like you might feel if you were to borrow someone else’s pair of shoes to wear to a fancy ball. They’re size 8. Technically they fit, but they are stretched and worn in all the wrong places and dancing is just an impossibility. Those shoes make you feel awkward and ungainly and as though your feet were right in the middle of your forehead. That’s how our life in the ‘burbs" of Washington D.C. felt. It looked like it fit. We almost blended in, got by, fooled everyone that we belonged, that we were one of them. We jumped right into the rat race with careers at full swing, a nanny living in our basement, soccer practice on Saturdays, but the shoe just didn’t fit right. When our neighbors hung out in the cul de sac barbecuing and talking about their lighting fixtures and flooring upgrades, floor plans, lot sizes and their plans for the kids to stay together from preschool right through high school we hung with them. Inside, though, we were both thinking something close to “Boy, these natives sure live interesting lives”. We were anthropologists merely passing through. We felt not only like fish out of water, but like fish so far inland we might just as well wait a million years until evolution granted us legs to carry us away. Several years later we would look back on this time, thankful for the lessons learned and glad to have been able to study the natives only to find that we were indeed a part of the tribe, but not now. Now we were nearly lifeless and flailing on the banks. So, we did the only sane, rational thing we could do. We moved to Disney World.

Okay, so technically we moved to Orlando, but Disney World was the real draw. Magic Kingdom, Fantasy Land, heat, sunny days, palm trees… We told ourselves we were looking for a slower pace of life, a “better” place to raise our kids away from the hustle and bustle. What we were really doing was moving ourselves just about as far from reality as you can technically get without needing massive quantities of mind-altering substances to take you there. So, here we looked for a house on a straight street (no more cul de sacs for us!) with the obligatory pool in the backyard and for a while this “being American” thing was working out just fine. Then we jumped in with both feet instead of just paddling in the kiddy pool. Jobs, friends, cub scouts, baseball, after school play dates, volunteering, dieting, exercising…these are the things that make up a real, true blue American. I built a beautiful, strong nest because that’s what mama birds do. Our house looked like we’d lived in it for generations. We acquired, accumulated and purged and completed the cycle again and again. We did it all. After some time, Mike and I both went into a frenzy of landscaping, rearranging furniture, painting and then it hit us like a two ton asteroid. Much like your first clue that you have a cold coming on is the annoying throat tickle, this current flurry of activity was merely a symptom of the onset of a simple, though life-altering case of wanderlust. It was time to move on, so Mike began the job search and before you could say lost luggage we were off to Dubai for yet another escapade.

During our time in Dubai, ironically, Florida became home for us. The concept of home has always been a tricky one for us. How extraordinarily effortless was it for the two of us who had grown up overseas and moved around so often to finally be able to give a simple answer to the question, “Where are you from?”? While in Dubai we felt so smug when someone asked the question and we could say, “Orlando, Florida”. The end. Period. No explanation needed. The last time we had lived abroad we had had no physical address in the US. The answer to the question for me invariably went something like, “Well, I was born in New York, but grew up in Maine and then moved to Egypt when I was 13”. Then I’d pull out my globe and my laser pointer and begin a geography lecture. Okay, not really, but that’s what it felt like at times. I remember when as a junior in college I went to the US to do my junior year ‘abroad” (confused? I was a student at and graduated from the American University in Cairo, Egypt) at American University’s Washington Semester program. Students from all over the US came to Washington DC for this program. The big question everyone asked each other? You guessed it-“Hey, dude, where are you from?”. It got so tedious and downright annoying giving the answer and then watching the eyes glaze over when I got to the Cairo part that eventually I resorted to fiction. In other words, I lied and said I was from UMASS at Amherst, a story easy to stick to because my roommate attended and had filled me in on all the tricky details. Anyhow, I digress…

So, there we were in Dubai as Floridians. When Mike’s assignment came to an early end two and half years into our adventure we returned to our home in Orlando. Having kept our house we had a soft landing, but the bloom was definitely off the Orlando rose for us. During our sojourn abroad our area of the city had taken a sharp and unrecoverable left turn into disrepair. Green pastures were being replaced by untidy sprawl, English replaced by a foreign language and “temporary classrooms” (read trailers) now littered the lawn of our children’s elementary school. We had been toying with the idea of selling our home and “moving up”, but now we considered moving out. Mike’s corporate headquarters, nicely placed in the rolling hills of North Carolina, was starting to look attractive. There was a problem, however, a crisis now causing whole hosts of Americans sleepless nights and heartache: The real estate market was plummeting like a one-winged Tupelov over Siberia. We were fortunate and sold after only a year. Only a year…who would’ve thought? We got out and took our proceeds and ran, never looking back. We ran far, far away from the housing market and directly to the front door of our friendly neighborhood RV dealership.

It all began, this RV adventure, one night in a restaurant. Mike and I had had the rare occasion to go out alone for dinner without the children in tow. Over dinner our conversation led, as it so often does with us, to dreams of the future, that murky, incalculable time still many years away. We had rented an RV the summer before and fell in love with the concept of RV travel. The notion of a mobile, nomadic vacation mirrored our life experiences perfectly. How would it be to live this way?, we wondered. What if the future were now? Over the next few months it became evident that it was an imprudent time to jump back into what was quickly becoming the real estate cesspool. Home values were falling and we were afraid we would get stuck with a house worth $1.98. The RV adventure, a year on the road with our children, each other and not much else, began to look very appealing. We were not interested in “dropping out” of society, but felt that we needed a change. Unruly toddlers get them, coaches demand them in tough spots, so why not us? A time out! That’s what we needed. A break. A time to breath, regroup, live. So, once committed to the idea we made it happen. We were given an opportunity, no-we CREATED an opportunity to trade one dream in for another and we welcomed that chance like a mother welcomes her soldier son home from war. We traded in the house in the “burbs”, the play dates, the sports practices, the backyard barbecues, the commute, the upwardly mobile movement towards success and instead became physically mobile on a journey of discovery. This is no accident that we are here in our 380 square foot home on wheels. This is perhaps the most well thought out, most purposeful, bravest move we have ever made.

What about the kids, you may be wondering? We have created, we like to believe, three beguiling works in progress. It is a certainty that we have passed on to them not only our wanderlust but also our love of exploration. They have been born into an extensive family of global nomads with all of the inherent challenges and rewards associated with their membership in this “club”. They are at home, as are their parents, both everywhere and nowhere at the same time and, also like us, they possess a multi-dimensional world view. Their identities have nothing to do with a physical, address-related place and while this is freeing, it is also a burden they sometimes must bear. We all feel that burden sometimes and have to enfold our children in the certainty that we are home. We = home. That is the only equation that truly matters. Yet, even now, we find ourselves saying “When we get home we’ll…” as though home were a Brigadoon-like place we are destined to reach. One day we may find a geographical home, a place we can call ours for ever and ever, but for now home is with us. We are sure that we are not lost, floundering souls trying to find or way home. We are home and we are mindful of that each and every day.

The idea of looking beyond the prescribed, pre-determined American dream may seem to some of you out there (and especially in the current political climate) distinctly un-American. We beg to differ and instead feel that we are circling back to the true ideals of our American forefathers and foremothers. Our dream is one of pursuing our “inalienable” happiness. That is our birth right and our mandate in life handed down to us by those who have fought and died to define true liberty and by those who have had the courage to dream dreams larger than their individual lives. That’s the thing about dreams-they are highly personal and have no frontier. There is no dream quota, no limit like in fishing. It’s not like we’ve caught our allotted three trout for the day and now have to let the rest slip from our fingers back into the icy depths of the river. We get as many as we need and can dream as big as our courage will allow.

We choose to think of ourselves as explorers. We are exploring the geography and history of this land that we are so thankful to be able to call our own. We are exploring what it means to be American in 2007. Most importantly though we are discovering who we are both as individuals and as a family unit. Ultimately, discovery is the product of exploring and this is the journey we have chosen to take. And so like Columbus and his ilk we will keep searching and discovering places that have been discovered long before we ever got there. Also, like our 13th century explorer friends we’ll just keep naming things we find even though we’re not entirely sure what they are. Joy, faith, love, marriage, citizen, home… these are the words that have meaning, but are meaningless without a context. We’ll seek a life in a context that fits us and have an extraordinary adventure in the process. In the end, it’s the best any of us can hope for. Now we’re living our dream.

Live well and dream big,
Liz
Somewhere in America, 2007

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Greetings from the Confederacy!

Our Story

The Road Ahead-Destinations on our wish list for the next few months:

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About Our Home

Our Travel Map

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Greetings from the Confederacy!

Our Story

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The Road Ahead-Destinations on our wish list for the next few months:

Blog Archive

Our Favorite Sites

Our Favorite Campgrounds and Resorts

About Our Home