Well, I’ve learned a few important lessons on the road – each of which, upon saying, may sound fairly self evident. One – Thanksgiving week in Florida is THE season for camping in state parks – BOOK AHEAD. Park after park that has 200+ camping sites has had ZERO availabilities. But, all you gotta do is find ONE! Two, turns out I like parking in spots surrounded by beautiful natural scenery. Who knew? So, yes, a few nights that I didn’t find a good nature-filled spot, I found one in a parking lot. Turns out, when the window covers are all on (other than the difference in ambient noises) it’s all just the joy of van life. Three – and this one is going to shock you – turns out going for an early morning run on a muggy morning, covered in sticky sweat and walking on a road that goes through a grove sitting in lots of murky still shallow water is a hot spot for mosquitos. So, I write this post covered in approximately 100 mosquito bites and as many dead mosquito’s blood on my hands, and a little of my own vlood mixed in there too. But, other than these very minor lessons learned, actually, including them – I continue to love van life beyond what I know how to describe. It turns out, one of my favorite parts of van life is being prepared. So far, I’ve fixed one leak and one broken drawer and was delighted when each problem came up that I had all the equipment I needed to do the job packed and organized in just the right spot. Ah the nerdy, nerdy joys of being organized.

My persistent love of van life after 4 weeks bodes well for next year’s 50 states tour that will require months upon months of van life – well, at least for my part. Speaking of – it was – as one might expect if you’ve ever met Ryan – awesome to have a couple days with him! And, while he only was here for two days and still questions whether he’s got the endurance for months of van life on end, right after he arrived, after proclaiming that he had missed me, he then said, unprompted, “and I missed the van too!”, so, there’s hope.

Oh, and I can’t leave out our stay at the goegeous Myakka State Park where there are alligators that make me excited to stay in the car and signs like the one below. Here’s one that was hanging out just below the bridge where we were standing, most certainly one of us was clumsy enough to go overboard.

It was both a distraction and a creative catalyst having Ryan here. So that plus the fact that it was so fun and wonderful to spend a few days with him, it’s definitely a net positive. While I definitely spent less time on the musical and research and the full immersion experience with him here, the time I did spend was wildly productive. That time was spent talking with him, reading my first draft of a few scenes and realizing, through reading, that some of them, how to describe it, um, sucked…which was very useful and helped me identify, with Ryan’s tremendously useful input, what really needed to be in the scenes. One of my first major script conundrums to crack, what are Janey and Wally talking about in their first scene together? I kept thinking about it and kept either coming up blank or coming up with terrible ideas. I knew they were terrible, but it’s what I had to start with. I knew what needed to happen in the scene, I knew how it needed to feel, but every time I thought about what they were actually talking about, it didn’t lend to either and was, well, just good old fashioned bad writing – a very good place to start. Ryan has been an incredible muse throughout the last 13 years of the musical writing process. Anytime I had a burst of inspiration, he’d cheer me on, get excited about it and start brainstorming with me until what I created was significantly better than before I told him – often times he’d chip in brilliant ideas, many of which have made the final cut in some form or another. So, he worked his magic yet again, and by the time he left, I had cracked a handful of intimidating script challenges that made it possible to just sit down and write the dialogue when that time came. I knew I’d have to wait until he actually left to have the focus needed to do the actual writing, but talking with him, I now knew WHAT to write in places where I had previously been stuck.

The two scenes that intimidated me the most, when it came time to write them, I just sat down and it seemed more like I was transcribing a scene I was watching in my mind – no effort to write – just the effort to type fast enough. I was super amped after writing and wasn’t able to calm down until I got a chance to read them over the phone to Ryan, like they wouldn’t let me rest until they could graduate from shapes on a page to sounds hanging in the air. Ryan’s response was affirming that I’m on the right track. One of Ryan’s many tremendous qualities is that he is incapable to fake enthusiasm, so when it comes out it is palpably real and encouraging. Those two scenes are now my two favorite in the whole script.! Wow, I can’t believe I can say things like, “the whole script” – I can’t believe I actually have a whole script now.

My biggest “fear” now is that, by actually putting a script and dialogue in there that the story that has lived so abstractly and unbounded in my mind for so long is, in some way, minimized by being squeezed into the tight container of dialogue that I have poured it into – but someday – it was always going to need that dialogue. And this is only a first draft – so I will keep editing it until the spirit of the story shines through amd has plenty of room to breathe. I look forward to the next workshop where I can find out from an audience how the dialogue effects the story, whether diminishing it or, hopefully, amülifying it and then go from there. I find it all to be such an exciting and fun process.

After Ryan left on Tuesday, I had a little trouble getting back into the bubble and time travel portal I had gotten myself into after 5 days at the World War II museum. It took me until that evening to realize what the distraction was – what is this strange feeling – ah yes, I’m sad. I miss my husband. I liked being with him and now he is gone. Right. Human emotions that don’t have to do with reflecting on history and writing a musical. I forgot about those! Luckily I was able to make good use of an uninspired day by doing the grunt work of my character list and setting and time description. By the next morning, I was back in the bubble, still missing Ryan, but no longer distracted by it (sorry, babe).

Luckily I was staying in a beautiful farm in central Florida and woke up to the sounds, sights and smells of the most peaceful scenery. I LOVE my mornings in the van – as I mentioned in a previous post. I continued watching Band of Brothers on Netflix, and before I knew it, I was back in the world I am hoping to pay homage to. The place I was staying that night was a Harvest Host location and the host was just wonderful – one of the friendlier, more accommodating hosts I’ve encountered so far (though none have been anything less than kind). She offered me a tour of her farm and told me about her young family and their newly fruiting dream to live the farm life. It was a wonderful experience at Thirty Oaks Ranch (https://thirty oaks ranch.com) ! Not to mention, they grow sugarcane and on the way out the door, I got a ball jar filled with freshly squeezed sugarcane juice and yes, it is as wonderful as it sounds!

The theme of this week has been “it’s starting to catch up with me that I didn’t get to finishing my itinerary before I left on the trip”. Each of these major trips I’ve left on have had so much planning involved, and sometimes, the day to leave comes before certain things get done. On my memory lane trip, the itinerary being core to the nature of the trip, it was the first thing I finished. Dates, locations, hotel, flight and train bookings were all made and secured before departure day. When I left on this trip, I barely even knew where I would be spending that night. And each day has been so packed since, that I haven’t yet caught up on itinerary planning. That said, Thanksgiving night – I got a message from my husband to check my previously empty itinerary spreadsheet – he had mapped out an itinerary for me starting on the 28th so that I could hit all the remaining places on my list. What a guy! That said, no reservations have been made. So much of the last few days has been calling place after place or submitting Harvest Host request after request for a same day reservation, trying to find a place and a somewhat coherent driving path to accommodate it. There have been more than one stressful moment when 3:30PM rolled around and I realized I still didn’t have confirmation where I’d be staying that night…but, as it happens, it has always ended up pretty great. Including last night when, driving up the east coast of Florida, having two Harvest Host requests go unresponded to and state park after state park fully booked, I stumbled upon a gorgeous county park (Long Point Park) and pulled in and asked the attendant with my fingers crossed “do you have any openings”. And this is where I landed for the night!

And then there was Thanksgiving – yikes – a voluntary solo Thanksgiving! I did have moments of, well not FOMO, but, I guess just plain MO – knowing that all sorts of gatherings were happening with friends and family of which I would not be a part. Occasionally that distracted me, but I decided that I would have my official Thanksgiving celebration be in the form of doing a Turkey Trot. I found one near by, slept in too late (which I loved) for the 5K, but made it for the one miler. I’m pretty sure the course was not a full mile, but if it was, I ran a 7:09! Woohoo! My watch insists it was a 7:22 and that I had only just run .9 miles, but, either way, I’m back in business baby. For those who have followed the busted calves/shins saga, they appear to be dang near totally healed. I had a nice 4 mile run this morning and they didn’t make a peep and I don’t know when the last time is that they have! After all the mystery of their persistent pain, despite doing all the right recovery things (which all helped me make slow, gradual, steady, but never permanent progress,) the final piece of the puzzle fit into place! It turns out my “sub clinical” thyroid issue for which I had been avoiding taking medication for years, was in fact not really “sub clinical” (meaning without showing symptoms) – as it turns out one of the symptoms is internal inflammation – you know like a muscle injury that just WILL NOT heal…now that I am taking daily thyroid medication – poof – they are all better. It is a good lesson that, effective problem solving starts with really knowing what the actual problem is.

So, now that I have succeeded in last week’s goal, which, at the beginning of the week seemed dang near impossible, I am staring down the barrel of this week’s goal which is intimidating me even more. All of the musical’s songs are written to some degree or another, but this week, my goal is to “finish” them all. The ones whose song structure is not completed, or whose lyrics are not yet finalized or edited or finished, the ones who have words where it just says “instrumental” but no actual written music to fill that gap and the ones that I can sing, but have no basic piano arrangement – that is what I aim to complete by the end of this week. And, yup… gulp. I am going to choose to believe I can do it, only because I have come this far, but not because I actually see it. Though I’ve been writing this musical for 25 years, every time I have ever written something, since it had days, weeks, months, even years to cook on the back burner, anytime I would actually sit down to work on it, it would just come out, often times finished after the first go at it. Some songs took ten minutes to write, some a cumulative 3 or 4 hours over a couple of days – but I don’t think there are any over which I have labored. They have all, more popped out of me like a newborn deer, full-formed, a little gooey, but pretty quickly, ready to stand on their own legs. But I have never worked on a song by sitting down and saying, okay, I need to “get this done”. So, this will be a different experience for me – but I figure, since they are all so close to done, and they have all been cooking inside for any number of years – it’s still an achievable goal. So, “once more unto the breach, dear friends”. (Am I quoting Shakespeare, or am I quoting Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting quoting Shakespeare, undecided). Next time I write, hopefully there will be another celebration of completion. Gosh, I gotta end with another Shawshank Redemption quote – cause they just nailed it with all the things, “I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.” Situationally, not a direct correlation, but, in spirit, yea. Yea, Red. Me too.