Readers, Future Me, Future Family…Writing and adventuring and traveling and schooling and working and housekeeping all at once is hard. I admit that I am not a Marvel Super Hero, I cannot do it all at once and at the same time.

Our adventure is truly a joy. The places that our family has been to and spaces we’ve been so fortunate to see, they laugh at the word amazing and tell it to come up with something grander to describe it all. The experiences that we have enjoyed go beyond adventure. Our journey has often been overwhelming. It is a lot, back to back. We are trying to see as much as possible of this country we call home, to visit as many National Parks as we can, to reach as many of the places we’ve read about and dreamed about as we can. And we are also still doing life: work, laundry, shop for food and cook meals, school work, walk the dog…all the things that people do. This isn’t vacation – though we did take a week off in Huntington Beach and that was so needed.

Our National Parks and Monuments are breath taking. They deserve our time and effort to preserve and keep them. The rangers are wonderful, we’ve enjoyed the company of so many of them and the knowledge they shared was priceless. They inspire our children at every stop. I hope they were all spared the sledgehammer those in power used against our National Parks and Monuments, among other systems our country has come to depend upon, as well as the nations and people who depended on our foreign aid.

I did not want politics to enter my recording of this adventure. But it is very difficult to be on this journey and have it not feel like a farewell to a system being torn apart as if being jettisoned into the past before anyone can stop it. As those feelings are plowing through us, there is also the exceedingly high stress of people using the federal government to come after members of my immediate family for simply existing as who they are. So politics are very much part of our adventure. We have added protests in a variety of places to our journey. We are standing up and making our voices heard. We all deserve to be who we are, we don’t want to live in an autocracy or an oligarchy, we like our democracy. It is not perfect, but we keep trying to “make a more perfect union” instead of turning toward a system that takes away our rights and freedoms by taking away our voice.

The writing that I intended to do, that I want to do, is not getting done. I wish I could do it all in real time. At the end of the day, I am spent so that backlog became a source for anxiety. Five people in a trailer is a lot of emotional labor for the adults, regulating our own and helping the kids regulate theirs. Then there is the mental work of processing all that we are seeing and doing. This is totally needed in order to not be overwhelmed by everything coming at us. It makes no sense to insist on writing now, when that mental energy is needed to keep an even keel. And it makes even less sense to make a project of love and memory a project of requirement and obligation.

As a result, I am putting the blog on the back-burner for a bit. When we get home, I will write. I’m not sure what my schedule will be, at the moment I’m thinking one essay a week. I will go through the pictures, create the galleries and write our story. The kids will continue with their essays as well.

I give myself grace, I hope you do too…looking at you, Future Me. I am excited to complete this blog. There are so many wonderful memories to share and keep.