The Natives Are Restless - RV Life Day #21

The pooch ate our breakfast. With dwindling supplies, the muffins I made yesterday would've sustained us another morning until we restocked our wagon. The bitch is a thief and you think we'd have learned by now not to store food on the gas stove next to the pleather couch when the natives are restless!

During our month-long RV trip, Mayzie, the middle-aged black Schnoodle with the gap-tooth smile, has consumed a half-loaf of bread, two dozen of grandma's chocolate chip cookies, my son's Doritos Locos taco from Taco Bell and a dozen cinnamon sugar sweet Raisin Bran muffins, wrappers and all. I can picture our two-year-old, eight-pound Schnoodle Ozzie watching her peruse the veritable buffet from below, lacking the fortitude to jump that high. I'm sure Mayzie didn't allow a scrap to fall as there's only one Schnoodle who needed the outdoor shower to shamingly hose off her hindquarters. Did she learn her lesson? No! So much for doggie FOMO (fear of missing owners), trapped in the RV with snacks galore. At least they weren't barking at the Battle of Little Bighorn when we sailed through the grassland gravesite yesterday, instead they were ravaging, and as in Custer's last stand, we lost a sobering defeat to the native RV Schnoodles.





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Only with severe turbulence on the way to Boston, our airplane bobbing and weaving like a toy on a string, pummeled by brute force and dipping up and down, have I experienced as much anxiety as I had driving an RV through Wyoming.

Oklahoma! Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain, and the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain... 🎵🎵🎵

Wyoming, has Oklahoma beat! The pitch-black clouds on the horizon loomed ominously as we headed north out of Colorado the other day, the demarcation line of the rainstorm a mere quarter-mile ahead. I braced myself in the passenger seat of the RV sucking in wind almost as hard as when I was teaching my teen daughter how to drive. The lack of oxygen in either scenario, staggering, as certain death loomed ahead. 

Sure enough, we were pummeled by a terrible rainstorm, and unlike the rains of Portland, it showed no mercy. Like an AK-47, we were hammered, pelted, and slammed with decibels so loud we couldn't hear my Pandora station on the radio. Cha, Cha, Cha, Cha, Cha... The winds equally as fierce, my husband appearing as if he was steering towards three-o-clock to straighten the tin can on wheels. I think the RV was levitating as I began to see the yellow-brick road with Toto, I mean Ozzie, shaking on my lap. 

"I can't see the road," I said to my husband, begging him to slow down, "We're gonna flip into the ditch!"

"Do you know how heavy this vehicle is?" he responded. 

"Well I've seen semi's overturned from hurricane winds like this," I replied. 

"Highly improbable!" he said confidently as I sucked wind.

We exited I-25 in Cheyenne, WY, and I breathed a sigh of relief it was not the Emerald City.

“I didn't say it was impossible," my husband continued, always considering the logical possibilities lest he jump to my foregone conclusions.


Our four kids, oblivious to the nerve-wracking ordeal we had survived, were glued to electronics, with core strength gained from bobbing and weaving to stay upright in the back of the bus. Meanwhile, my overweight Schnoodle was enjoying the breeze.



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We’ve studied Native American oppression, from Mt. Rushmore to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, and like every good-intentioned parent, my hopes of educational entertainment were dashed by the native teenage refusal to comply with American authority. "One picture a day mom," their mantra. Luckily I snapped two, the boys posing next to the territorial sign of our state.




I must say eastern Montana is a close second to Wyoming when it comes to gusty winds. I gasped yesterday, as I steadied the wheel at three o'clock, with cat-like reflexes from decades of driving, the only thing that saved the RV from the prairie dog ditch. I shudder thinking what could've happened if I only had one hand on the wheel.


My husband and I alternated four hours each, from Mt. Rushmore, where politics and COVID-masks collide, to Bozeman, Montana yesterday, where a red, white and blue trump rally was unfolding. I'll admit the last hour was comfortably the least bone-chilling of the drive yesterday.

"You're going 80?" he said, clambering his way to the front of the RV.

"I like to open 'er up on the straightaways," I replied. As if I needed his advice, three hours in! Picturing myself at the helm of a ship tossed by the waves, proved key to my driving success, allowing for plentiful oxygen at the bow of the boat.

Apparently, the air was thick in the rear without an RV generator for air conditioning mixed with the aromas of teen spirit, nevermind the Schnoodle with digestive issues.

We sailed into the Bozeman Trail campground ten minutes ahead of schedule last night. 

"What, there's no pool? What kind of campground is this?" the RV natives exclaimed. 

"Do you remember how to toss a ball? Your eight hours of screen-time are over!" I barked, reaching for the corkscrew because wine before whine is my new RV motto. Cheers to surviving another Adventure in Motherhood!

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