230120 Have You Ever?

Have you ever thought about this?

Sell everything you have, pack up the car and drive wherever the wind takes you.
I met a guy at work in San Diego who did exactly that. He and his wife bought a big Dodge van, left Minnesota, traveled all over the country and ended up in San Diego, where he took a job working at Burroughs shortly after I had started there.
I would have liked to do that myself. Joyce and I considered buying a pull trailer, hooking it up to my 65 Chevy truck and heading out for Missouri after my navy time. It would have given us a place to live in until we could find a more permanent home there. We were at an RV sales lot and found a trailer that would have been right for the job. We were ready to sign the papers and buy it. The salesman seemed to be wary, thinking possibly that we couldn’t afford it. He told us to go home, think about it and make sure we could get the money to purchase the rig. It was late in the day and maybe he wanted to close up and go on a hot date he had. Whatever his reason was, he lost a sale and a commission on the sale.
We went back to our apartment on Coronado and Joyce began to think it may have been too small for us and our daughter Annie for an extended period of time. We didn’t buy the rig, sold the truck for what I had paid for it a year earlier.
I was honorbly discharged from the navy on a Friday morning, went to the apartment, walked in the door and said, (They finally let me go.) it was a strange thing to think about after 11 years of service. That Sunday morning I got a call from the Naval Air station on North Island. The voice on the other end of the line told me I had to come in and stand a watch because the guy scheduled for it was sick. I laughed and said, (Get somebody else.) The voice said I had to come in for the watch. I said, (No I don’t have to, because I was officially discharged on Friday morning). The voice went silent and then he hung up the phone. We packed up that weekend and headed back for Missouri.
I’m still sitting here thinking about selling out everything, thinking about packing the car and heading out to wherever the winds would take me. It would be fun for a while, dangerous for an old man alone, maybe I would tire of it in short order. I’ll never know.
One last thing, I remember another guy I worked with in San Diego. He was heading from L.A. to San Diego with everything he owned in a rental truck. He stopped in San Juan Capistrano and went in to have lunch in a restaurant there. He finished his meal, walked out into the sunshine and some nefarious character or characters had stolen his truck. He had nothing left in the world, hitched a ride to San Diego and ended up living under a highway overpass until he met a preacher that came by and that is a whole other story. The guy ended up at Burroughs and began work in the same area as I worked and that’s another story.
Happy dreams and daydreams to all of you.