For four months, when my daughter Emily had a bit of a tick, she traveled with my wife and four months on a gigantic journey through Europe throughout America. We traveled 17,000 beautiful horses in our 24-foot home Tioga Class C, across 33 states, in a media tour organized by the Association of the automotive industry. Our task: to talk to journalists and TV journalists about how great it was to camp with our child in the RV. And so we are day after day, week after week, month after month in cities all over America. It was, I must say, the appointment of a dream.
Our small motor home has become special for us in those wonderful months. This led us through the Alligator Alley of Florida and into North Carolina to the place where Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew by plane. It took us to Franklin County, Missouri, where I stumbled upon the last corn pipe plant in America and in a funky cafe outside of Little Rock, Ark. Where Bill Clinton ate hamburgers once.
Our Tioga took us to Boston, where we spent a hot day down the Charles River, talking with old friends who stopped while we were waiting for the media to show us the cameras, and ask how great it was to travel with the kids.
Emily opened her eyes wide to everything she saw and experienced. She was driving her autocress on the dining table, hour after hour, looking out the window until she was bored, and at that time we would lay out the Barney tape on our 12-volt VCR to temporarily take it. Every time we went to the side of the road, she was excited that a new adventure awaited her. What would she find, she must have been surprised when she went outside? Sea beach? Forest? Does the cafe have fish and chips (her favorite food)? Or maybe another playground?
She played in hundreds of playgrounds - whether in campsites or city parks. The thought more than once disturbed me the idea that we should call our tour "Playgrounds across America."
Emily collected a seashell basket on a Florida beach and lowered her legs in the Suwany River. In Maine, she is in lobster, and near Indianapolis, pursued fireflies by a cornfield. In tiny Millersville, Ohio, she marked the fourth of July with local people and her wide-open eyes of parents who had never witnessed such little urban patriotism. Perhaps the real finish city of the Mayberry, Andy Griffith, really exists.
Also in Ohio, Emily caught her first four-inch perch fish. She also had lunch on a perch with her uncle George in Cleveland. However, she was not crazy about fried marinades in St. Louis. Louis, but she loved strawberry waffles, which she shared with me in Orlando.
Coming out on a rock overlooking the Pacific Ocean, it struck gray whales that passed outside the window of our motorhome. At a thousand miles away, she posed for a photo on a giant shalalope in South Dakota. In Indiana, we rushed out of the motorhome during a break in a stormy thunderstorm to click on our photos on the grave of Annie Oakley’s wild western mare.
Many nights we built a fire, where we roasted marshmallows and told about the adventures of this day. Life, I suspect, is not better for a child, or, I must add, for dad!
Every night we put Emily in her own bed, which was familiar and safe for her, no matter where we camped. Today, this bed is still one of her favorite comfort zones.
My daughter, now a teenager, was too young to remember much of this trip, but I believe that she will always be deep inside her. Today, when summer comes, she is still the first in line to jump into the motorhome and go to the campground.
