My wife and I began planning our joint retirement four years in advance (calling those four years our freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years of retirement, building up to a sense of beginning rather than ending). As the senior year marched toward graduation, we decided that it would be great fun to get a little campervan to facilitate our travels during retirement. Our parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren were quite scattered around the country, and a campervan would make it easier to stop for a visit and not inconvenience them by being underfoot, and would allow us to camp, hike, and go fossil hunting to our hearts content on the journeys to and from.
We’d always been tent campers in our years together, but the ground had been growing harder for several years (or maybe we were getting older), and so we anticipated the idea of being able to have a bed all ready to sleep in when we stopped, and to not have to worry about setting up camp or cooking in the rain. Stop when we wanted to stop, go when we wanted to go! Footloose and fancy-free!
We did not fully anticipate the delightful spontaneity that the campervan allowed in where and when we could stop. We soon discovered that we didn’t even need to reserve ahead for campsites! Many states allow overnight parking at roadside rests, and often there are city parks where we can park and spend the night. “Stealth camping” the young campervanners call it! We drive until we get tired, or spot an interesting museum, or park, or mammoth fossil bed to explore, and then stop.
Sometimes the roadside rests have the most delightful trails to explore, trails like the one pictured above, a grassy trail around a rocky monolith, which we hiked around as the sun grew low at dusk, delighting in the great exfoliated slabs of rock (exfoliated: that’s a geology term, which we also delighted in talking about on our hike, remembering that we used to both be geologists!). Independence Rock provided a wonderful and unexpected surprise on the way to visit family in Utah. Spontaneity, the joy of the road!