Several weeks ago, I shared about our freaky experience at Jones Water campground, after which, we swore off free campgrounds. Until now, of course.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I am moving to NYC to attend Columbia University for grad school. And the process is turning out to be super difficult financially. After 6 weeks of job-searching, C was offered a job in NYC in a career field in which he is college-educated and has 5+ years of experience. Know how much they offered him? $30,000. Yep. A social services organization in New fucking York that purports to help people get on their feet and move into housing, and they want to pay their college-educated employees so little that they couldn’t possibly even afford to secure a decent apartment thenselves. So fuck that. He turned it down, and we’re staying in Tucson for the next 6 weeks or so. 

Our apartment lease was up May 31, and we secured a house-sitting/cat-sitting gig for June 8 – mid-July. But that left us without a house for a week. Thankfully, we have some great people around us who offered us beds and couches, but we’re trying to not impose upon our friends more than we have to.

So we are camping. And although our experience at Jones Water made us not want to consider free campgrounds, being between houses while trying to save for a move to NYC made us reconsider the likelihood that a murderer is hiding in wait at the free campgrounds. There’s also the fact that this campground is way different and way better than Jones Water. For one, it’s not right off the highway or right down the road from a prison. It’s up on a mountain, tucked back on a dirt road in the forest. We even heard a tree fall this morning! 

Before beginning this extended camping expedition, we cleaned out our apartment and moved everything into storage. And while sorting and tossing as much as we could, we found a bunch of unwritten postcards that accumulated over the years. Some from national parks, some from islands, some from Tucson (where we live) which I assume we bought when we first moved to Tucson, and every day still felt like a vacation. We decided to give ourselves one last chance to send the postcards before tossing them. We decided to mail one each day that we are between houses. However, Kehl campground, and our trip so far, is nothing to write home about. Or maybe it’s just that we don’t actually like being without a home base. The road trip and nomadic lifestyle has been over-idealized. It is not a vacation. Sure we are seeing a lot of pretty things, but it is still life – the beautiful and the ugly – just in different surroundings where you don’t have a comfy mattress, air conditioning, or a regular stovetop. And life for us right now, is kind of stressful.