Permanent vacation

We've sold everything and we're hitting the road with our kids.

By Kate Convissor

Aug 9, 2000 | I think that last grim call from the principal did it. Our son was suspended. His grades were as volatile as the NASDAQ. Plaintive notes from teachers bleated from his backpack. And it was only October.

The principal was weary of the boy's antics. So were we. We knew that our son was trying hard to plant a flag in the adolescent wasteland. But a seventh-grader with an attitude does not fare well in a zero-tolerance habitat. My husband and I looked at each other helplessly. What are we going to do?

We reviewed our options. Home-school? No, we would drive each other crazy. Different school? No, nothing to prevent an encore. After a moment of silence my husband said, "We could just leave."

Click.

It was as if a lock we were struggling with suddenly sprang open. The last piece of our 5,000-piece puzzle slipped neatly into place. Of course. We would leave. We would tough out the rest of the school year, sell all our belongings, buy a trailer and travel until it was time to come back. We would cut away the anchor of possessions and routine and see what really matters. We would pack up our two youngest children and embark on an adventure that might change our perceptions, our relationships and maybe the course of our future.

In the process, our kids might discover a wonderful, enchanting world beyond 'N Sync, the flickering blue screen and "whatever." We might all rediscover one another.

As it turned out, our son's academic woes were just a catalyst to jolt us out of the snug and familiar, a life that could go on cheerfully and uneventfully until time took away our options. Once that niggling seed of adventure was planted, it became increasingly hard to ignore. It grew in our imaginations until it was so enticing and inevitable that uprooting it would have been like tearing out a fingernail.

Call it midlife angst. Call it intimations of mortality. By now our four older children were lurching into adulthood -- we could tuck the next youngest son safely into the college dorm on our way out of town. Time on the road could be a palate cleanser, a chance to figure out, as my husband once said, "what we should do with the time we have left."

We told a few friends of our plan, and to our amazement they believed us. Wait, I thought, what if we change our minds? What if we wake up one morning horrified by our insanity? What if we want to say, "Jinx. Only kidding." But everyone looked at us with round, serious eyes and said, "Wow. I wish I could do that." (You could. Why don't you come with us?) Or, "I'd like to do that, but I'm too afraid." (And you think we're not?) We looked like mature adults firmly in control of our destiny. We felt like small children lost in the mall.

Now all we had to do was sell our house and cottage and a lifetime of accumulated trash and buy whatever mobile abode the four of us could survive in for a few years and many thousand miles. We decided on a truck and "fifth wheel" -- one of those trailers that attach to the truck bed. Soon we were learning about hitches and GAWRs (gross axle weight ratings) and NCC (net carrying capacity).

Next Page: So far, we are $40,000 in the hole

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