Contrails: The Winter of Our Contentment

By Steve Weaver

Morro Bay, California. (Steve Weaver)’m having the same problem with time that you often hear older people complaining about. It seems to pass faster each year than it did the year before, and about a dozen times faster than it did when I was in school. Then, a school year stretched ahead like a life sentence and once winter arrived it seemed that it probably wouldn’t leave until I had passed away from old age, still seated obediently at my desk.

Now I’m looking at the end of my six-month sojourn in California and in terms of elapsed time, it seems as if I arrived from West Virginia only a month or so ago, and that I should still be settling in for a pleasant winter on the Central Coast.

Fast as it was, it was a happy stay for me in Morro Bay during this, my third winter here. I feel really very blessed to have discovered the perfect place to escape from the season of the bleak and the dark in my home state. The climate here on the Central Coast is as close as the outdoors will ever come to fitting the human sweet spot of cool nights, warm days, low humidity and abundant sunshine. The folks who live here are open and friendly and ready to help anyone that needs it. Drivers stop for you if you even look like you’re thinking of crossing the street, and sometimes they wave at you for no reason at all, just like in the South. The town of Morro Bay is small and the harbor is post card beautiful, and if like Otis Redding you want to sit on the dock of the bay, you can watch the fishing fleet go out in the morning and return in the evening with their catch.

I’m located at an RV park right in the middle of town, where everything is a five-minute walk away. The park is small and spotless and many of the campers, like me, are here for the winter and become real neighbors over the season.

It seems to me that part of the fun of discovering a special place is being able to show it to people that you care about. Doing so seems to give one a sense of pride, as if you had a hand in creating the place and not merely discovering it, as silly as that sounds. “Here, this is mine and now I give it for you to have too.”

My attorney daughter Stephanie, who lives in Connecticut, has visited me here several times and she too has fallen in love with the area. Like many folks from the East, her idea of California was LA, and she was thrilled to find the open spaces and untouched areas that are everywhere on the Central Coast. Both she and I love the outdoors and we have hiked, biked, run and walked the area so many times, but there always remain new places to explore and a new adventure to look forward to.

This week my doctor daughter Shaun is visiting from Mississippi, which will be her first trip here. I’m looking forward to introducing her to my second home and I’ve planned a beach horseback ride and a wine tasting for us, as well as some side trips to a few of the local sites that have dazzled me during my stay. I have no doubt that when she leaves she will have succumbed to the charm of the Central Coast too.

The end of this month marks the end of my winter encampment and I’ll hook the truck to the fifth wheel, cast off and start moving east. Like horses, humans love the familiar and routine, and at the end of each migration I experience the same feelings that a barn-sour horse must have. I want to resist the change that leaving a place and returning to the road brings, and I accomplish the myriad of details required to ready for the road with a mixture of sadness and vague foreboding. However, I know from experience that once the highway starts unrolling beneath, all the negative feelings disappear and I become a creature of the road again.

My planned route home to West Virginia this year will take me through Bakersfield, across the Mojave Desert, through Barstow and up route 15 through Las Vegas and on to just south of Salt Lake City, where I join I-70. Then it’s a straight shot across the middle of the country to Vail, hopefully in time to meet Stephanie for skiing. Her scheduled week in her time-share condo there is always the first of April and it has become a family tradition for me to meet her there for a ski vacation each year.

I usually schedule several weeks to complete the almost 3,000-mile cross country with the seven ton fifth wheel. This gives me the ability to do short two to three hundred mile days, with ample time to stop and see things along the way. Spots that pique my interest can prompt a stay of overnight and sometimes longer.  Last year for example, I did a short side trip to visit Hot Springs, Ark. where I planned to overnight, but after checking into the extraordinary National Campground there, I liked it so much I stayed a week. Technology and a mobile office enable me to work from anywhere there is cell service and I take full advantage of it.

I normally do a couple of nights of ‘dry camping’ at a Walmart or Cracker Barrel, since those good folks allow overnight stopping for RV’s, then do a night in a camp ground where I can dump my tanks, take on more water and do chores, such as laundry and serious cooking.

Sometimes I’ll arrive in the early evening at a Walmart and be the only RV there. I choose a corner of the parking lot, run out the slide, start the generator, and work for a couple of hours in the office. After supper when I take Austin out for his evening walk, I’m sometimes surprised to find as many as a dozen other RV’s circled around me, reminiscent of the wagon trains that crossed our prairies in the nineteenth century.

I find that once I settle into the rhythm of life on the road, it’s as comfortable as being moored. The days flow together as the topography sweeps by and does it’s slow dance of change from desert to mountain to plain. My plan is to arrive back in West Virginia about May first, in time to greet the brilliant green of an Appalachian Spring. I’m looking forward to catching up on the news and being reunited with friends and family who have suffered through the terrible Eastern winter. Hopefully they won’t hate me for missing it.