Dan and I have always owned a camper.  When we were working and the boys were in school, having a camper helped us stretch weekends, enjoy vacations with our home on our backs, and in our retirement, has given Dan and me a mobile condo with which to explore the world.   With no schedules, no plans, and plenty of time, we have traveled and lived in our various campers as much as three months at a time.

Beautiful Texas desert

William Least Heat Moon’s 1981 autobiographical travel book, Blue Highways (Little, Brown and Company, 1982), charts his three-month journey across America following backroads (The blue marked highways on a map).  It is philosophical, informative, and Dan’s favorite book.  He discovered there is a free interactive map of Mr. Moon’s travels, complete with a dot to click to read of his adventures in that spot.  We sometimes follow Mr. Moon’s map and doing so a few years ago led us to Texas’ oldest city, Nacogdoches.  While Mr. Moon had very little to say about the town, we enjoyed our campground there, an unusual place where a flock of large, noisy, and curious peacocks lived.  The peacocks were perfectly at home and would sit on the handle of your camper steps and roost on the banister of the bath house.  They were beautiful and scary.

After setting up our camp, we drove to town and happened upon a privately owned memorial to the space shuttle Columbia.  When the shuttle exploded in 2003, much of the debris landed on and near the city and after the government inspected and analyzed what was left of the shuttle, this citizen organized a memorial. The building is only open to the public three days a year and we just happened to hit upon one of those days.  What an unexpected, unplanned thing to run into.

Twice we have camped on the beach at North Padre Island, Texas.  Walking out your front door directly onto the beach, coffee cup in hand while watching the waves and sea birds is a beautiful thing.  However, coffee cup in hand and opening your camper door in time to watch a small wave break on your camper steps, is not a beautiful thing and required quick moves on our part in order to avoid an unexpected sea journey.  We thought we were back enough from the water, but the exceptionally overnight high winds had driven the water much higher on the shore than we expected.   The Rangers told us that they hold an auction every year of the salt drenched campers that floated out to sea.

 

We once inadvertently wound up in Terlingua, Texas for Christmas. Terlingua is a rough and ready desert rat town just outside of Big Bend National Park. That Christmas, the campground restaurant  hosted a Christmas dinner, and we went.  The room was full of locals, scooting the tables together and when their tables touched ours, they invited us to join them.   A pony-tailed, tattooed, biker boot-wearing fellow seemed to be  in charge and was just one example of the people we met that day.    A former motorcycle gang member, the man left the gang to scout movie locations.   A musician named Tall Paul and his interpretative dance partner sat across from us and we learned that until the pandemic they’d mostly lived and worked in Germany.   The local folk of Terlingua took us in that day and made our Christmas special.

Christmas lunch with Tall Paul and movie locations finder, John

Old Hispanic cemetery at Old Terlingua

As the locals talked, we kept hearing about the Starlight Theater, a place of good food, local musicians, a dance floor, and various events throughout the year including a local’s burlesque show.  THAT conversation was interesting.    The theater was located in Old Terlinqua, a nearby deserted mining town.  A day or so later Dan and I went, enjoyed the good food, listened to a great locals’ band, and most of all had fun watching all the people.  One tattooed man, however, kept staring at us, even following us to the lower-level dance floor.  We noticed his bar stool had a Bandidos Motorcycle Club jacket slung  on the back of his chair and when we got back to the camper  we found out the Bandidos are one of the largest gangs in America and are constantly tracked by law enforcement because of their organized crime activities.  Hopefully he didn’t think we were the new drug dealers in town.

Traveling without a plan, going where the wind takes was a dream we always had.  The unexpected adventures, the encounters with others, with wildlife, with nature suit us very well and we always return home a little wiser and filled with gratitude.  These Texas country camper stories are examples of our dream, but you may have a different one.  Follow it, if circumstances allow it, follow it as much as you can.  Dream-chasing changes you, fills a spot in your life, teaches you.    As Dr. Seuss says, in his book Oh the Places You Will Go (Random House, 1990),  “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose”.  That’s right, Dr. Seuss.  I would add “you might fly in the sky, you might land on your head, but you should just try, do not stay in your bed!” (Me attempting to channel Dr. Seuss).

Cindy Arp, teacher/librarian, retired from Knox County Schools. She and husband Dan live in Heiskell.

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