On the Road with Julie

Day 1.

Well, I’m still figuring out how to upload videos to this thing and I am writing my Day 1 post on Day 5, so here’s the update on the first week on the road.

The day I left on the trip, after a full week of last minute to do’s to get the van ready, including new tires and an inspection (thank goodness for Ryan that took care of ALL of that) and tons of packing and organizing, Ryan and I headed to Wegmans for the third to last stop before I actually hit the road. And the coolest thing happened.

We were walking through the parking lot and this older gentleman was walking from one side of his car parked in a handicap spot to the other side. He was kind of swaying like he was having a little mini party. He called out to us, “It’s gonna be a great day.” This, on its own, would have been enough to tickle me silly and feel like the universe was reaching out to me to give me a thumbs up for the journey ahead. I have walked through the Wegmans’ parking lot MANY a time, hundreds, easily – maybe thousands. And, already, this was an experience I had never had, so it felt auspicious enough. Then, he said, unprompted, “And there’s gonna be a lot of dancing.” WHAT?! I’m sorry, but, I don’t know what you believe, but that was magical! Here I am, off to write my musical that, in fact, does have a lot of dancing, a musical that is, in many ways, an homage to the older generation, and some older gentleman calls out to me, unprompted, as I am leaving on my maiden voyage, “It’s gonna be a great day, and there’s going to be a lot of dancing.” You decide what you want, but I took that as a big ole hug and high five from life itself and I was as pumped as ever to hit the road.

Right off the bat, once I hit the road, I was as happy as could be. The song, “Here I go again on my own…” was the first song on the radio and I was feeling pretty good.

We recently found out about a great app called Harvest Hosts which, for $99 a year, you can sign up to get access to a network of breweries, golf courses, farmers and friendly folks around the country that welcome RVers and camper van folk to park overnight in safe spots. It is encouraged that you patronize their establishments and spend at least $30. It’s a wonderful network and welcoming community.

My first night, I had a reservation at The Blueberry Patch in Mansfield, Ohio, just a few miles off the highway. It was a beautiful place to start the trip and to realize how much I LOVE van life and how great an idea this was to take “6 weeks alone in a van” to finish this musical.

My goal, when starting this trip, was to make it to New Orleans by Saturday, November 11th, Veterans Day. The National World War II Museum is in New Orleans and I figured there would be no better way to spend Veterans Day. When planning out my itinerary and how I would use my days, I knew I wanted to be driving, hopefully no more than 3 or 4 hours every day, with hopefully a number of days that would have no driving at all. Leaving on November 6th meant that, if I drove 4 hours each day, with possibly one or two 5 hours days, I could make it to New Orleans by Friday, November 10th and wake up there on Veterans Day, ready to hit the museum.

That is exactly what I’ve done, and I’m writing this now in the early hours of Saturday, November 11th in the parking lot of a golf course in New Orleans, finally catching up on blog-writing after a wonderful first week in the van.

My goal for my writing by the time I got to New Orleans was to finish transcribing my little red composition notebook. For 25 years, I have guarded this notebook with my life as I have moved from place to place. I can’t believe I’ve succeeded to hold onto it. All those years, it never felt right to copy down what was written in it, even though it was my only copy of many of my songs, including my favorite one that I did NOT know by heart. It just felt like the notebook is where the story was meant to live until I was ready to give it my full attention. Everything I wrote in it, I wrote in pencil, so in addition to it being in a very fragile medium of paper that is losable, burnable and vulnerable in all other sorts of ways, after 25 years, the pencil was starting to fade. So, I decided, finally, on this trip, I would transcribe it.

In doing so, it has amazed me how much the lyrics that I wrote 25 years ago were the ones I remembered in the songs I did happen to remember, and how much they were just right, right out the gate without any editing. It also amazed me some of the CRAP I wrote for dialogue 25 years ago that essentially, with the 25 years of hindsight, I could tell was actually just a veiled diary entry about my own feelings. But, in amongst the crappy writing, there were a few good scenes of dialogue peppered in there.

And, on one page, I found a piece of advice that I wrote to myself that gets right to the core. I find myself moved by it and also impressed by my 19 year old self for writing it.

”You don’t have to come up with ideas. You just have to let ideas flow through you.”

And that is, indeed what I’ve done.

Day 2, though I felt terrible driving right through Dayton, Ohio where I have family, keeping to my 6 weeks alone in a van as much as I can, I drove by without a phone call (sorry Sean, Jen, Claire and everyone else!) and made a stop at the Airforce Museum in Dayton, Ohio for an impressive and in many moments, sobering walk through World Wars and Holocaust commemorations.

To stay on track, I only had an hour at the museum and then made my way to a little 5 generation family farm in Kentucky where they had me park right next to a pen of sheep. Two nights in a row, I slept log a log. Gosh, I love van life.

The next day I would be heading towards Nashville where I intended to stop and party, country style, for a little bit.

On this trip, I identified three types of destinations I intended to visit. One, stops that have relevance to the musical that I’m writing. This is where stops at the National World War II Museum or the heritage trail in Georgia, or the memorial in Washington D.C. end up on the itinerary. Then there are stops that are places that are conducive to creativity and writing – this is where all the beaches I plan to stop at on my way back up the coast come into play. Then there are places that inspire me to be a musician, a creative artist. This is where Nashville landed on my list big time!

My friend with whom I’ll be traveling to Amsterdam at the end of this trip lives just about an hour east of Nashville and I hadn’t yet decided if I wanted to visit her in person or not. I knew I’d love to see her, but I also knew I was pretty committed to this “6” weeks alone in a van thing. I ultimately decided it would be ridiculous not to swing by, especially since we still needed to iron out some logistics for our trip. I made my way to Cookeville, Tennessee to say hello. In 30 minutes, her and I had nailed out our trip planning and delegated our respective duties for getting ready. Both being entrepreneurs, trip planning with her is a dream. We both know what we want and how to get ^#%^ done, how to take leadership and how to delegate. It took 30 minutes for us to get on top of it all and be off with each of our respective jobs to put the trip in place. I was already in trip-planning heaven.

Then, I went for a 2 mile run that was way harder than it had any business to be, especially since I’m finally back up to 5 miles after over a year of recovering my shins. I blamed it on the heat and the driving, took a shower and was heading out. I told her my plans to go see Derek Hough at the Grand Ole Opry that night and she excitedly said, “Wow, can I come with you!” I figured ONE afternoon and evening not alone in the van was okay and she made the calls she needed to make to clear her schedule and we hopped in the van for Nashville!

We made our way to the famous Broadway where we stopped at Hattie B’s for some of that famous Nashville spicy chicken and it was DEEEEELLICIOUS! I was impressed by how dressed up people were on the streets. I was in my own fancy white skirt that I got a few compliments on, but, wow, I was impressed that these Nashvillites partied in style. Outside the honky tonks, not only were there cowboy boots to spare, there were people in evening gowns and dressed to the nines. I LOVE this, I thought. Only later did I find out that the Country Music Awards were THAT night and right across the street from where I was. Now that is a party that I’m glad I walked through, or by, at least.

Derek Hough was great, and just as the fellow in the parking lot at Wegmans had said, there was a whole lotta dancing! It was great and definitely kept my inspiration high. My friend got a ride back home and I spent the night in front of a nice woman’s fence in a suburb in Nashville, thanks to Harvest Hosts.

The next day, I made my way to Tuscaloosa, Alabama and pulled in 15 minute before close at the Moundsville Archeological Park. It’s a beautiful park dedicated to the mounds created by the Native American people of that area. They have a beautiful museum and a nice little area with 30 campsites that was almost empty. I had the most wonderful evening, feeling as truly “alone in a van” as I could have hoped for.

When I checked in at the museum to get my campsite for the night, I couldn’t tell if the jovial Alabaman that greeted me by telling me that he and his friends were just busy brainstorming how they would get drunk that night was serious or just having fun with this naive looking solo traveler when he warned me not to go out alone at night. Well, that part seemed earnest, as was his initial reply when I asked him if it was the humans or the animals that I needed to watch out for – it was his follow up response that got me. Both he said. Seems reasonable enough. He definitely got my attention good when I asked him which animals. Rattlesnakes and copperheads. Okay, right. Now I’m paying attention. I forgot, I’m not in Kansas anymore…actually, more like, I’m not in upstate NY anymore. I lived in Missouri for a summer and I almost stepped on a copperhead once. So, I was feeling duly warned…but then the list continued, coyote. Okay, fair enough, I don’t need to mess with a coyote. Then, the list continued. “Deer”, he said. And, he must have spent a good 5 minutes going on with why I might need to be more wary of deer than coyote. I don’t doubt that a deer protecting it’s young could knock me the %$$ out in one fell swoop if it wanted, but, well, I fell asleep not all that worried that I would suffer a deer attack. But it was entertaining and they were as hospitable as could be.

Other than the baby frog living in one of the toilets, I am happy to say, the visit was peaceful, quiet and wonderfully uneventful.

Throughout the week, I have been working steadily to transcribe my notebook and all the voice recordings on my current phone. In doing so, I rediscovered 3 more songs that I forgot I wrote and I finished it all by Friday night, right on time.

One last thing that is an important part of the update – when I first started driving, I started listening to the types of YouTube videos that I usually listen to, on language or physics or architecture and design – that lasted 15 minutes before I thought, what the heck am I doing, there’s got to be great World War II research I can do while I drive. I found a wonderful channel on YouTube called Memoirs of World War II with World War II veterans recounting their harrowing, heart wrenching and amazing stories and recollections. I listened to hours of them. Then, ready to find some good homefront content – since the musical is really about life on the homefront, I stumbled upon a docuseries from ABC back when Peter Jennings was the man telling the stories called, “The Century”. The first episode I listened to was the 1941-1945 episode and it was pure gold for what I’m trying to do. Then, I found myself interested to travel the entire century and have enjoyed every minute of my drive, rolling through a hand full of states from north to south, from New York to Ohio, to Kentucky, to Tennessee, to Alabama, through Mississippi and now in Louisiana, traveling through time and space in America.

And now, here I am in a golf course parking lot in New Orleans, caught up on my transcriptions, finally caught up on my blog posting and now, ready to go for a run and then off to the museum to attend the Veterans Day commemoration at the National World War II Museum and I’m pumped. I’ve watched Hacksaw Ridge, Saving Private Ryan, Unbroken and started in on The Pacific. I plan to spend the weekend here in New Orleans, immersed in the museum until I’ve had my fill and then I’m off to Florida to write on the beaches.

No matter what I do and don’t accomplish with this musical, the adventure is already more than worth it. And, my biggest dream, at the end of my days is to know that I tried to make something of it and tell this story that’s been sitting inside of me for so long, and that is one thing I know with 100% certainty, that I am doing.

Until next time!