Since the pandemic hit our area in mid-March 2020, the hubby and my son and I have pretty much hardly left our house. Since we can both work 100% from home now, and our son has started virtual schooling… well, we just don’t have much reason to get out. Ever.
But after nearly 6 months of this… we were FED UP. We needed a change of scenery… while still being as safe as possible. (None of us want to catch covid, no matter what the chances are of it being a severe case vs a mild case, just no all around, thank you.)
So, four weeks ago, we decided we’d rent an RV and road trip it halfway across the USA. We were gonna head west.
Nevermind the fact we’d never RV’d before, ever. Nevermind the fact we’d never hauled anything as long as the 29′ RV we rented before. We made reservations within the next few days after randomly deciding this, I packed and researched itinerary over the next two weeks, and last week we spent 7 entire days on the road and out and about in the west.
We made a big loop that started in Kansas City, Missouri, went up into South Dakota to the Badlands National Park, then to Deadwood, then to east Yellowstone in Wyoming. We spent three days exploring Yellowstone, then headed back through Nebraska before finally arriving home late last night.
And the vacation–no, no, not a vacation… RV-ing is WAY too much work to call it a vacation. Let’s call it an adventure–the adventure did exactly what I’d hoped it would do.
It reset my mindset.
Yes, we were so stressed pulling that massive camper through small town streets and up mountain sides that sometimes I wanted to cry.
And yes, the first night we set up in the Badlands after dark and I barely slept because I was so stressed, I regretted the whole trip and wished we were just back home and had never had this stupid idea in the first place.
But then again… that’s also what I thought the first night we were in London, and that vacation-adventure ended up being one of my all-time favorites. So I kept telling myself to hang in there, and I did, and I’m so glad I did. Because the rest of the trip (except for the last day, really, which was all driving, ugh) was AMAZING!
And yes, I got my mindset reset. I got to forget “real life” and the “real world” for an entire week, lose track of what day it was, and just enjoy new sights and new experiences, and it was glorious!!!
I was able to re-prioritize and re-energize. Came back home more grateful for everything we have than I have been in a long time, and also more motivated to get some necessary stuff done that I just hadn’t been able to muster the energy for before.
Changing up the routine is really SO important for me. I really shouldn’t have waited 6 months to do it this time! 😛
And BONUS! Along the way, since we headed out west, I was able to gather a LOT of fantastic book research!! Especially on our half-a-day in Deadwood, South Dakota, which I’d really wanted to visit since watching the HBO series. Not only did I love the series (and the movie), but I was fascinated by the history of the town, and as usually happens… we got a lot more details on that history by going there in person.
Online research is all fine and good to an extent, but in my experience, you only get the really GOOD stuff, all the crazy little detailed stuff, when you visit a place in person, and especially if you can go on any kind of guided tour. That was our experience in London, and that was the same experience we had in Deadwood.
One of the things I didn’t realize until visiting Deadwood in person was how quickly that town developed. It didn’t really compute until I saw the actual pictures of it. It went from a few tents to a full-blown, bustling town in only twenty years. WOW.
It was only after realizing this that the answer to a puzzle in my Legacy of Lucky Logan series came to me. You see, in my series, there is a town called Blessing, which is a rather large town, and quite popular and busy. Much like Deadwood, where people first came for the gold, people first came to Blessing because a large Old World ruin was found there. And in my story world, Old World ruins are a source of wealth. Prospectors go into the ruins and bring out metal scraps, which they then use to make other needed goods, sell to others to make goods out of… or they bring out gadgets, which they sell to collectors and scholars for good money.
But as I was writing book 1, I kept thinking to myself, “Why aren’t the ruins cleaned out already? If all these people are going down in there to harvest the metal/gadgets… how is there still any left? And why are these barons still fighting for control? How come they haven’t figured out the pecking order yet?”
But then on this trip I realized… these kind of towns can really develop quite quickly. Blessing might be larger and busier now… but that doesn’t mean it’s been around all that long! It could have been established just in the last twenty years or so, much like Deadwood was… and over time ballooned into a proper town. But its resources are not yet depleted… and so there is still a constant influx of those seeking their fortunes… and the barons were the original people who came to Blessing when it was first discovered. Over the years, as other prospectors came in and moved out, the balance of power stays in constant flux…
And I quite like this idea, and I think it will work very well for the rest of this series! But see… if we had not taken this road trip, or passed through Deadwood, perhaps I never would have realized how quickly these things could happen, and I wouldn’t have found such a perfect answer for my own fictional tale…
Ah, the joys of real-world, in-person book research! I also learned about making gin from juniper berries on this trip, and was so inspired by a particular environment of Yellowstone that I decided to change the setting of one of the prequel books from Colorado to Wyoming!
But those are stories for another day… for now, I’m off to channel this new-found energy into starting final edits on the book 2 draft! Not long till publication now, meep!
Until next time… happy trails, folks!
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