We Might Be Too Old, but We Did It Anyway

It’s very easy, almost reflex, to slide into thinking you’re too old to do something because it is hard. Before we bought this camper van, we briefly owned an Airstream Bambi, a trailer that we intended to tow with our truck to all the amazing places out west or down south, everywhere. But the Bambi had all these systems – electric, propane, fresh water, dark water, gauges and meters, and an error with any one of them could explode the Bambi in flames. Complicated. The learning curve stretched from here to the grave. And then I jackknifed the truck into the Bambi and so we decided we were too old to have a Bambi and we sold it back to the dealer. Then we went camping in our $100 tent and envied all the people younger than us.

Maybe your dad put you on a two-wheeler when you were four and sobbing for your training wheels. Maybe then, even though you were too young to have a two-wheeler, you figured it out and zoomed around the block with your dad screaming and waving his arms around in victory. Maybe when you think you’re too old to do something you already screwed up, you try anyway, and you end up backing into a campsite, nice as you please, and you raise the roof on your camper van, and make dinner on the induction stove with your electro-magnetic pan, and you eat carrot cake with a plastic fork, and you feel your dad in heaven doing fist bumps in the air.

We’re too old for any of this but we don’t care. Very early this morning outside the campground bathroom, a man carrying a towel and a roll of toilet paper stopped to admire our dogs. We like this even though this was a particularly urgent time of day after a very long night in our new camper, made roomier by the absence of a toilet. The man talked about how much fun it is to travel with pets, told us he had two dogs who laid around outside his RV and a cat that mostly stayed inside. And so, we thought, hey, we could bring our cat next time. There could be the two of us, the two dogs, and Hercules all motoring around America in a red camper van. Who says we can’t? Not us.