Get An RV, They Said. It'll Strengthen Your Marriage.

This puts a whole new twist on "what I did last summer"

It’s no secret we live the dream around here, at least our version of it. X & Y Communications is a location-independent business with virtually zero overhead, so we make our own rules, set our own hours, homeschool our kids and are therefore basically, well…free.

One day back in 2009 Emily and I woke up, looked at each other and realized, “you know, we can leave home whenever we want. Even for weeks, if we want to.”

The travel adventures began. They were glorious, running the gamut from meticulously planned world domination to random acts of spontaneity.

After about a year of this, including that time we survived the Great Experiment of a 4000-mile road trip to the Northeast and back with three kids, Emily dropped the bomb that would rock our world forever.

“We should get a camper.”

At this point it would be useful to mention how twenty years prior I had been sent off to one of those ivy-walled private schools back east with a clock tower. Meanwhile, my amazing and adorable wife was somewhere in the “holler” in Kentucky.

No judgment. I mean, J.D. Vance is living proof of how either or even both situations can work out pretty well.

Nevertheless, Emily “growed up” with a completely different mindset than I did. So naturally, we had entered our marriage with rather opposite renditions of what owning a “camper” means, and what kind of people might engage in such.

But here’s the thing. Not only do I adore my wife and love to see her flash the most addictively radiant smile ever, she and I actually think almost exactly alike.

So being the indeed adventurous sort such that I had suddenly become, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. If she was so sure she’d love the RV life, chances are I would also…as soon as I could wrap my head around it.

I agreed to acquire a small, well-traveled pop-up camper for about two grand. It could be pulled by our relatively reasonably-sized Family Truckster without any issue. Better yet, after Great Experiment v2.0 we could surely flip it (figuratively, we hoped) for about what we paid for it.

Fine.

We hitched the thing up and went through Colorado on our way to Yellowstone (of course), and through Utah on the way back. We stayed in the Great Outdoors at national parks where there weren’t hotels for miles.

In stunning symmetry with our previous travel adventures, it was all glorious.

By the next summer, the pop-up was a distant footnote in the lore of McKay travel.

You guessed it. It had been replaced by a full-tilt 28-foot travel trailer, dragged around by a fresh full-size SUV that could handle the job.

Oh man, Casa McKay was a happier place than ever. Our marriage was that obnoxious one other couples dreamed of.

Until it was time to back that thing up into a campsite.

Look, we should have been better prepared for the homewrecking mayhem that ensued. After all, didn’t Lucy and Ricky do an entire movie on how Long, Long Trailers reduce relationships to rubble?

But let’s stop kidding ourselves. Who knew there is no greater test of relationship sanity than attempting to finagle a ludicrously awkward rig into an impossibly tight spot, all hopefully without causing thousands in damage to it, nearby raccoons and whatever that thing is called you hook up all the RV connections to?

Worse, our first attempt at such a perilous task was at night.

“Okay, get back there and point which way I should go.” She positioned herself behind the camper accordingly.

There was only one problem. I couldn’t see behind the camper. Mostly because campers are opaque.

Given this was around 2am at a crowded RV park in the woods, I whispered as loud as I could, “I can’t see you.”

Of course, “loud whispering” is an oxymoron cut from the same cloth as “government efficiency”.

Frustration already building, I threw the truck in “park”, stormed out and stomped to the rear of the trailer.

With a distinct tinge of sarcasm, I blurted out what I thought was obvious. “I CAN’T SEE YOU!”

Her measured, steely-eyed response was devastating. “Well, maybe if you condescended to open the window of the truck, we could hear each other better.”

Yeah, I had to admit she had a point.

Mildly emasculated by spousal logic, I limped back to the truck. With a freshly opened window, we resumed the baleful task at hand.

Suddenly, I start seeing random flashes of light as if the Aurora Borealis had freakishly reached the Texas Panhandle. Emily’s apparently solution somehow wasn’t to move to where I could see her. Rather, it was to utilize a flashlight to indicate where I should go.

As Dave Barry would say, “I promise I’m not making this up.”

The truck was thrown back in “park”. I again stomped to the rear of the camper.

“What part of ‘I can’t see YOU’ did you miss the first time? A friggin’ flashlight tells me nothing!”

Her retort was as lightning-fast as it was laser-focused. “We have cell phones for a reason, you know.”

My eyebrows raised, and I exhaled. Every Jon Hamm character ever would have been jealous.

Back to the truck I went, SMDH.

Frustrated and defeated, I picked up my cell phone. Seconds later, I threw my cell phone.

“No service”.

Pondering how the entire universe was conspiring against me personally, I attempted to steal a precious moment of solitude in a useless attempt to decompress.

But alas, it was my lovely wife’s turn to stomp in my direction.

“What part of ‘call me’ did you not understand?”, she scream-whisperered.

“Maybe the part where there’s no service!”, I growled, this time audibly.

Somewhere in the bushes the three bison that would have probably attacked and eaten my wife under more civil circumstances scrambled in the other direction to escape our potential humanoid wrath.

Oh, and you might be wondering what our two teenage kids were doing this whole time. Far smarter than their respective parental units, they both feigned deep sleep against all odds. It was a potentially life-saving measure on their part.

Eventually, about an hour later, the RV was parked, apparently successfully.

That’s when the evil really started.

After fumbling with the aforementioned flashlight through the process of cranking up the front of the trailer, removing that load-leveling contraption and triumphantly uncoupling the hitch, it happened.

“Oh, this won’t work. The trailer isn’t level.”

Words failed me. All I had left was my best imitation of Charlie Brown’s “good grief” appeal to the Heavens.

The entire brouhaha of torture basically started all over again, only this time with the added horror of trying to balance a 50-foot rig onto unseen leveling blocks, all the while not running over my wife’s hands as she weirdly attempted to shuffle them around in real-time.

I mean, as much as I might have fantasized about indeed running over hands in the moment, they had proven useful in the past. Therefore I showed restraint, if not precision.

By now, there are several things you’ve probably already figured out on your own.

First, there’s zero possibility of meaningful “make-up sex” when sharing a travel trailer with two teenagers. Simmering until we allegedly cooled off was the only option. Well, that and beer.

Second, if it occurred to you I might not be very good at backing up trailers yet since I was new at this, give yourself a gold star. But let’s just say Emily was far less charitable in the moment. In her estimation, this talent should somehow have been baked into masculine instinct by evolution.

Nevertheless, I dutifully recognized the glimmer of truth in her assumption. As much as I wanted to calmly suggest we trade roles, I knew better. More bison would have been sent scrambling.

Nope. Alas, it’s the husband’s divinely-mandated lot to park the blasted camper.

Third, you’re probably also astute enough to realize this same inherently cursed routine had to be repeated nightly for a month of Groundhog Days over the course of the road trip.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It was a cycle of marital pain and disgust mildly mitigated by whatever cool adventure we engaged in during the day. Well, that and beer.

I got better at parking a trailer. The kids got better at feigning unconsciousness.

One would think all of that would have improved matters.

One would be wrong.

Though well-practiced after a couple of weeks, any expected goodwill from that was trampled underfoot by Emily’s inexplicable persistence at standing behind the trailer night after night waving a flashlight.

Finally, weeks later, we rolled back to the doorstep of Casa McKay here in San Antonio. The homecoming was a letdown. We immediately planned our next RV trip.