The Last Thirty

A family adventure with relatable mishaps while planning to travel overland to Baja, Mexico

As the sun reflects off my keyboard, I sit in an open area of a little café. Yellow and orange tiles spread out in makeshift patterns below me. The wind rustles the nearby palm trees and there’s a small hum coming from the cafe fridge lined with indiscernible ingredients. There are ramblings coming from children playing in the open square next to me. I take a sip of an ice-cold drink and catch my breath. I’m happy to be here and really glad the family is back at the RV park taking a break from the road we just came down; the many miles of road that led us to this paradise, Baja Mexico.

Let’s back up a few and really dive into what an undertaking this has been and how we’ve arrived at our long-awaited mission. We began this journey in Bend, Oregon. We had just returned from a giant western tour in an attempt to introduce our newborn to our family and ride out the pandemic in isolation. Now we stand at our storage unit getting ready for what’s next. We have been through a lot at this point and believe we have a system in place. The mosaic puzzle that is our everyday existence in our rig is almost refined, so we thought.

A loud clang rings through the frozen morning air, and the sun is still low in the sky. I unlock the storage unit and lift the door which makes a horrible screech. All our belongings lay before me. An old International Scout that came from my grandfather’s dealership in 1978 which was eventually sold to my dad that I grew up in, is parked just off to one side. Clear bins line the other side filled with mostly kitchen pieces and parts, a few boxes of clothes, and a collection of things from our past that will most likely go away once we go through them again. In the front and on both sides, stand three giant racks of gear, towering to the particle board ceiling. It contains everything we need to do what we do comfortably, the gear to capture it, and all the hard drives filled with the past. And then in the middle shines a dusty, but beautiful, custom Ducati Monster 750 I bought back in college to get around a little bit more affordably. At least that’s what I told myself when I went into debt for it. In addition, my Santa Cruz Bronson CC, was just begging to be taken on the next adventure. That’s it. That’s all we have, and it still feels like too much.