Andy's Addiction

Chapter 4: Overture

The morning after our wedding we left Ohio. We were headed across the top of the US, then cutting down the West coast, driving across the bottom, hitting Florida, and heading back up the East Coast. We were borrowing my friend's camper van. She took my car for the duration of the trip. We were going to do a lot of sleeping in the van to save money. My brother was watching my cats.

A lot of the places on the itinerary had to be removed or altered, due to my injuries. I wanted to push myself, but Kevin made sure most of the heavy walking and standing stops were at the end of the trip, to give me the most healing time I could get.

Our first stop was the upper peninsula in Michigan. It worked out perfectly with the solar weather to give us a chance on seeing some northern lights. The lights were faint, but we could still see them. The leaves on the trees had also started to change colors, so there were beautiful shades of oranges, yellows and reds on our drive. We found a secluded area to park the van and Kevin helped me climb on the top to lay. We put a blanket under us and a fluffy comforter on top of us. We watched the stars and faint northern lights until we fell asleep. It was the first time since the accident I didn't have some sort of weird or scary nightmare from the accident. I felt safe next to Kevin and being out of Ohio.

I was woken the next morning by the smell of Kevin cooking us breakfast on my camp stove. He made pancakes. We had some mix that only required adding water to it, so it was perfect to take on a trip like this, where we didn't have access to a fridge consistently.

When I awoke I could see the stunning views around us. The beautiful lake and plush fiery trees. The sky was vibrant blue with some fluffy pure white clouds. It was a perfect first morning on the trip.

Kevin helped me climb off of the top of the van. He was worried I was going to fall. Movements started to feel more like second nature to me again, so I wasn't worried.

Today we had plans to head to Wisconsin in search of cheese. We wanted to find the best cheese we could find for the most reasonable price. We tried Lots if different cheeses at lots of different places. They all tasted way too delicious to decide which one was the best.

One of the rules we made for the trip was no social media. We weren't supposed to post anything until we got back. Our phones were for emergency purposes only. We had my digital camera for taking photos and we each had a Polaroid camera. We took photos of every new cheese we tried and every new stop we made. People gave us some side eyes, but we didn't care.

Another rule we made was that we had a 10"x10" collapsible cube from the dollar tree and any souvenir we got for ourselves that wasn't clothing we were going to wear on the trip had to fit in it for the duration of the trip. We also had a 15 gallon tote for any souvenirs we wanted to get for other people. This trip wasn't about buying things, it was about living in the moments and experiencing life.

We also had a shared 5 gallon trash can we bought for shells and rocks, separate from our souvenir cubes. We wanted to focus on living in the moment, but we also knew our love of pretty nature things. We know we wouldn't really be using the can until we got the West coast, and when we got to Florida, but we wanted something specific anyways.

We also decided that every fourth night, we would get either an Airbnb or a hotel room. I had a planet fitness black card membership, but we still wanted to be able to sleep in a real bed every now and then. We knew some places it would be hard to find a safe place to park for sleeping in the van.

Our next stop on the list was Mount Rushmore. We heard it wasn't exciting, but now that I couldn't do a lot of walking, we couldn't do the hiking in Badlands National Park like we had originally planned. After going to the monument, we went to the gift shop and got us custom shirts with our own faces on Mount Rushmore. We put our shirts on and ended our day with a picnic at sunset.