My love for travel runs deeeeeep. I yearn for places, both known and unknown, from a place within. It is hard to trace it to any one thing (I think it is mostly inherited from my wanderlusting father) but there was one very pivotal event in my childhood that had a significant impact on my life. It was the time my parents decided that we should move to California. Or better known as: The Great Robison Family Let’s Move to California Expedition.
I was born and raised near Daytona Beach, Florida. My parents were both snow birds from Port Huron, Michigan. They came to Daytona on their honeymoon and decided to stay and raise a family. But, things change. Dad loved it out West: the mountains, the dry air, the carpet grass! So the idea of moving to California wasn’t a new one. It made sense, we had relatives out there in Arizona and California. We had already spent several summers making the loooooong several thousand mile trip from Florida to Phoenix, and on to San Diego in our family’s blue Ford van.
My mom, dad, brother and I, before my sister was born – and the old Ford van.
This time was different though. It wasn’t a camping trip through the desert, or a drive through the mountains. This was an actual move. A relocation. A big one. The house was already sold. The Budget truck was packed. And the blue van (with trailer!) was overflowing with everything we owned – including our fat white house cat.
The excitement was palpable. I was only 10 years old at the time. My older brother 14 and my little sister just 5. The whirlwind 4 months that followed would be the trip of our little lifetimes. One that would ultimately brand me with the insatiable urge to travel as an adult.
It was a journey that left the adult me with a paradoxical feeling that I could never truly call someplace home – while also feeling right at home anywhere in the world.
The catch was -we didn’t actually have a home to go to in California. My parents were making this trip up on the fly, assuming (and hoping) that, of course it would all work out. The expedition took us from the East Coast of Florida, all the way to Northern California. We stayed there for about two weeks looking for a rental house before we came to the conclusion that maybe this wasn’t the place for us. So the journey continued, in a search to find a place that truly felt like “us”. We explored a few more towns in Northern California before we thought, “what about Nevada? Utah? Maybe Colorado?” So we began traveling back across the USA, eventually making it to Michigan. All the while we wondered, would the next town be our new home? Which highway exit would lead us there?
We had fun too! Dad even got on a horse!
At first, the journey was fun! Pretty much like our vacations past, but with a lot more baggage – and the cat. But after a while tensions surfaced – and the stress threatened to crack us as a family. It became a desperate search for someplace to be – the right place to be – anyplace to be. Some days, dad would just take a random highway exit and drive through a new town. He would ponder aloud as we drove through… “this seems like a nice place! Want to live here?” Despite the uncertainty, dad pioneered our misfit caravan on with determination. And with just as much determination, mom did her best make every new budget hotel feel like home. The Easter bunny even paid us a visit, hiding eggs in our hotel room.
We had made it all the way back to Michigan, but we knew it wasn’t going to be the place for us. Mom and dad had moved on from their childhood there – they weren’t going back. So then we headed south, to the familiar places we knew: Northern Georgia and North Carolina. Previously, we spent many summer vacations there, and loved it. So we sat in the foothills of northern Georgia for a while, and even put an offer on a house. But when that deal fell through, we did the unthinkable: we returned to Florida. Not only did we go back, but we bought some land just 10 miles south from where we started.
In the end, we spent almost 4 months traversing a great big triangle of the USA, looking for a place to live – only to end up 10 miles down the road from where we started. Was it defeat? Maybe. Looking back now as an adult, the whole ordeal couldn’t have been easy for my parents. But our “new” life in Florida afforded us a new adventure anyway. We had some land in the country and I was able to fulfill my (and my mom’s) lifelong dream of owning a horse. This life was different from the one we left behind, just a few miles up the road. Which is what you are looking for when you move right? A new life? Well, we eventually got there – via a long and stressful grand tour of the good ol’ US of A.
This childhood journey shook up my beliefs on the concept of “home.” Home, I learned, could be anywhere. Any place you are, as long as you feel content there. Home at that time, was the big Ford van, it was the hotel rooms that mom tried to make inviting – it was anywhere we were as a family. The constant motion of that journey and the ever changing scenery out the window should have made me anxious – yet I learned to be at ease anywhere we were. It was a life lesson I’m grateful I learned, because now I am able to feel at home anywhere on the globe.
>>Next Chapter: My father, the legend