Off the Road Let-Down

It’s a cold, rainy, dreary morning.  I’m back in my cozy little home and sitting in my  study once again surrounded by my treasured books and familiar surroundings after our five-day trip to Maine and back.  I’m sitting in my comfortable recliner with my computer on my lap and my cup of coffee within easy reach.  Ahhh, to be back home is good.  

When on the road in our miniature RV (Odysseus) I sit on a little camp chair (in the front of the RV) during the early morning hours while my spouse sleeps-in just a few feet away.  In the five feet available to me between the foot of the bed and the front seats, I make my morning coffee, unfold the camp chair (no elbow room at all, let alone reclining space or a convenient table for my cup of coffee) and sit with my computer on my lap. It is comfortable, but a bit tight.  Nevertheless, even as I enjoy this comfortable and more spacious place called “home,” I’m already missing the “on the road” experience.  

Here I am in the midst of all the comforts of  home and feeling a bit nostalgic.  I don’t have to roll up the bedding and push any buttons to “undo” the queen-size bed this morning, turning it into a sofa!  I won’t be setting up the little table in our breakfast nook and making blueberry pancakes or oatmeal in the microwave.  It will not be necessary for me to disconnect the water hose, the sewer line, the electric cord, the TV cable, or turn off the propane switch, or turn the fridge over to coach battery power today.  Why, I won’t even have to move the paraphernalia from the front seats of the van to the back of the van in order to drive off somewhere.  Ahhh, to be home is good, but what will I do?

Even though I am back home  there  is within me a yearning for yesterday when I was on the road going somewhere and it didn’t really matter where.  Just to drive to a beach or a bit of shoreline in Maine that I had not seen before, or even one I had seen several times before—was an adventure of great magnitude.  To travel down some country road just for the sake of traveling down a country road was a thrill beyond compare.  As Nikos Kazantzakis (The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel) writes:  “roads opened everywhere like roses, and he rejoiced at the road left, at the road right, in his dream’s dazzling fog.” So in my dream’s “dazzling fog” I rejoice in the road left and the road right, and yearn for the day when I’ll  be on the road (both left and right) again.