On Being Flexible

If somebody was telling me that they were going to go live a year on the road, one of my main pieces of advice would be get ready to be flexible. It is not always an easy feeling not knowing where you are going to be sleeping in a week or two and when you throw in other trips or commitments, the calendar can start to look a little tricky. Up until now we have tried not to commit to things too far in advance because we kind of like getting to know an area and then making our plans. Spontaneity leads to views like this:

Morning at Apalachicola, a spontaneous stop

This week, however, that all kind of blew up in our faces and I spent six hours scrambling yesterday so we wouldn't be left wandering the roads come Sunday and didn't come up with a single thing. What did help was that I complained to my mom and within an hour she found us a campground that had room for us all. Thank goodness for moms, phone calls and Internet. This trip wouldn't be possible without all three.

For the past three years the boys and I have taken a month long trip with my parents during the month of March. Chris has joined us anywhere from 10 days to two weeks and it has been magical to leave the winter of Colorado and hit the beaches for warmth. This year was going to be no different even though we are on the road. We had the house paid for in the Dominican Republic, plane tickets purchased (my parents coming from Colorado, our family traveling from Miami and Matt and Jenni on separate flights from Colorado), and a dog sitter in Miami. The coordination is no small puzzle with flights being purchased to meet up in other places, hotel stays, car rentals, house rentals and of course figuring out when people can take off of work, so I was a bit surprised and thought my parents were joking with me when they called and said it all had to be rescheduled. Due to a lot of great reasons for my dad's company he simply could not leave during the month of March. Everything had to be changed. Miraculously we made it happen. Our rental house let us switch our house with no penalties, flights were changed by adding some extra fees, our dog care let us cancel with no penalties and everybody was able to switch their work schedules around so that we can now go in May. The after effect was that now our family was going to have an additional month in Florida that we had not been planning on, and now, everything is booked!

We finally scheduled a place for the next three weeks, unfortunately it is opposite of where we would like to be, but on the plus side, it looks like the area will be pretty and it is definitely not a place we would have visited otherwise. The other plus is that we will have more time to explore Georgia and South Carolina. I let my friend who lives in SC know that we scored a beautiful camping spot based on her suggestions and surprise! They scored the same camp ground for the same weekend. I also found out that two of our fave families from home will be flying into South Carolina while we are there, so we will get to visit with them! Our two weeks in DC will match up with seeing one of Chris' life long childhood friends and we will fly from the Dominican Republic right back to where we wanted to end up, in Maine, where another favorite family of ours will fly to meet us so we can explore Acadia National Park!

I am typically a big believer that "everything always works out." And it has. I stopped to think about if the trip had not had to have been rescheduled and we had just arrived expecting to find a campsite in Miami for the month of March for Chris to stay in. It would have been extremely frustrating to coordinate as there were literally no vacancies besides a couple of days here and a couple of days there. Maybe then the lesson would have been learning to boondock for an extended amount of time. I'm not sure if I'm that flexible...yet.