Repairs

Looking properly ashamed of herself.

The crazy thing about living as a perpetual camper is that to make "home" repairs to your equipment, you often have to stay someplace else. Yesterday, in a bout of overwhelming excitement at seeing another dog near the tent, Piper lost her ever-loving mind and tried to jump out to visit the passerby. In the process, she ripped the inner door screen and punctured the sleeping pad. It was enough to make me want to call it quits right then. 

"I'm done. I can't. What was I thinking? Why am I doing this? Will I ever be able to get her to NOT act a fool and stop ruining our equipment?"

The last question helped me realize that the future I have laid out for myself includes more of this adventuring with the dog. This journey - this pause in my ordinary life - is to give myself time to figure things out. I haven't done that yet. I have no idea where I want to go. I am not ready to decide if I'm willing to apply for another coaching position.

I do know that I have seen some genuinely beautiful things in the last month that I'd never have explored on a traditional vacation. I am more self-reliant. I am much more annoyed that I never properly trained Piper to follow basic calming commands. I am living within my means. I have visited friends and family I've never taken the time to visit before. I am learning that duct tape is not the recommended savior of broken things when the broken things are camping gear. 

So, today I bought patches. And nylon thread. And a mosquito head net that I can use for the fabric if the sticker mesh patches won't work on the extra long tear. I learned that the 24/7 KingCamp chat service lacks a critical component (someone to answer the questions). I now know that there are approximately 100 types of sealant glue in at least three separate departments in the local Walmart. 

I'm going to take tours of the places I was here to see this afternoon/evening and then enjoy the air conditioning and a movie while getting to use experience gained from thousands of pulled stitch mistakes on homemade sewing projects to DIY repair the door. And then, at our next stop, I'm going to use patches and sealant to fix the mattress (which is still perfectly functional at self-inflating) so I can reasonably deflate it to get it back in the car.

My new motto, adopted the night I arrived here in the dark and had to set-up camp (see the post I haven't written yet about that), is:

Tomorrow, I'll have learned things I don't know right now. 

It's a way to keep hope that the trials of today will be worth something, even when I cannot see the value in it right now. To find out if my repairs work and see pictures of all of the really amazing places I stopped in the last time zone, you'll have to keep coming back.