The Seven Year Itch
What I learned to love about life after living in a campervan
After ten months of life in a campervan, the Rainbow continues to drive through Ignacia’s dreams. Throughout the first week in our new home in Southern Utah, she woke up again and again, bewildered and to be honest a bit saddened. It is quite surreal to end such a journey this way, in uncertain times under the threat of a deadly virus.
Now this wild adventure is behind us, and she feels lost when she doesn’t wake up in a random town, in the middle of the Andes, or in the fog of the Atlantic, or looking down a rocky expanse of the Patagonia’s nothingness. We have begun living a new life in the sandstone canyons of the Colorado Plateau, but our heads are still full of scenes from a Rainbow.
This is the muscle memory of living in a van. On our mental nightstand sits a family portrait of me behind the wheel, Ignacia my co-pilot, and in the back, two little girls fighting, playing, screaming, or sleeping in their car seats.
When you set off on a journey like this, there are a lot of unknowns and notions that could make or break a relationship. For us, the big adventure popped up in our seventh year as a couple. After testing our relationship in five countries, you could say this is how we scratched our seven-year itch. I wonder how many people would double down like this? Would you drastically reduce your living space and belongings to a campervan for nearly a year? Would you put your current life on hold, move out of your apartment, take your kids from school, and quit your job? Probably not in the middle of a global pandemic, but after that?
Granted, it’s a different sort of scratch for a different sort of itch. Life in a campervan is not for everyone. Before you begin to dream, you can save time and money with two simple questions: Do you love to camp? Do you love to drive? If you cannot answer yes to both questions, search no more and take a two-week vacation to Hawaii.
Beyond the abundant amount of camping and driving, the rest of it-the language barriers, the border crossings, the mechanics, the bad weather, and all the times when nothing seems to go according to plan-is precisely what you are pursuing. These are the episodes that turn an overlanding voyage into an edifying, memorable, and life-changing event. Perfection does not exist at home, why should it exist on the road?
When we set off, we set goals to write about the experience once a week and illustrate scenes from each country we visited. I ramped up the blogging in order to tell stories of family dynamics, about the places we visit, and the lessons we learn. Ignacia started a series of illustrated books about two intrepid girls discovering South America in their Rainbow campervan. The stories we have told range from vanlife with a three year old, homeschooling, and eating, to catching altitude sickness in Peru and an exploding windshield in Argentina. I wrote stories about stories, and documented one of the most painful chapters of my life involving a herniated disc in my lower back. All in all, I wrote more than 30 blogposts about this charmed vanlife in South America. Ignacia continues to illustrate her books, which we hope to show the public by next year.
One day, when my daughters are old enough to look back and read the blog and flip through the photos, as a family we will sit around the kitchen table and laugh. And though we can’t remember every detail, every country, every national park, every highway, at least we can refer to the many pages of the blog and recall the time Lucia drank out of the pee-pee bottle, or Elisa found the beached sea turtle in Ecuador, or lost her first tooth in Peru, and the time a monkey bit Lucia in the Amazon (a story that did not seem so funny then). We can dote on the time Elisa slipped into the saltwater pools in the Salinas Grandes in Argentina and she earned the nickname Salty Foot. The time we towed the van 30 kilometers not realizing we had the kill switch engaged or the time we went to cook lunch in the shadows of Cotopaxi and the backdoor wouldn’t open. There was Mino’s run in with a cat in Cuzco and the skunk in Piedra Parada. There’s the stinging nettle acupuncture in Colombia, and sneaking the chicken feet and necks to Mino from the most well-intentioned bowls of sancocho in Valle de Cauca. There is the puma-guanaco game in Patagonia National Park with friends, and there are the people, the strangers, the new friends, and the many old friends revisited.
My mother says our memories are to be cherished. If you lose them, you’ve lost an important part of your history. Family stories create a sense of belonging early on before school and society begin to pull us in diverse directions. Those memorable moments with our parents and grandparents are some of the first stories that shape who we are. When we started this family, we lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Our first real home was in Monrovia, Liberia, and our most stable period came during three years in Bogota, Colombia. And then, in 2019/20, our family’s history was written by a campervan. Like a nomad, our family’s identity is in motion.
At the very least, that campervan, the Rainbow, has permanently marked six-year-old Elisa and hopefully reached three-year-old Lucia. Not merely by the things that they have learned on the road, but in a deeper sense. Today, these children from the youngest generation are from nowhere and everywhere, bilinguals with several countries of residence, and now more than a dozen countries visited. One day on the playground here in the US, a new friend will ask Elisa why she didn’t go to kindergarten last year. She will tell her friend that she lived in a van, traveled over 25,000 kilometers, and visited eight countries. That kid will probably ask her what kilometers are.
In one memorable blogpost, I set out to restore the idea that our ancestors were the original nomads and wanderers, moved by a biological urge to spread out and discover. And from our guts our restless tendencies call us out into the wide, wide world to meet the people and feel the curvature of the planet. The campervan trip lasted a mere 10 months, and we fit it in between our careers, our children’s schooling, and our own families. But the journey started long before we set off, and will continue into 2020, and on, and on, into many years of the future. One day, when our Rainbow lives are long behind us, barely discernible in the rearview mirror, we still have the memories. We can read a post and flip through the many photos. And the nomad family will travel, yet again.
Originally published at https://nicoparco.com on April 9, 2020.
