As our visit with long-lost relatives in Fresno came to an end, we found ourselves thrust upon Easter, a time of year that always brings back a flood of memories. During our many years of touring the U.S. in an RV (or other motorized vehicle) with our son, we always seemed to land somewhere memorable at Easter. One year it was in St; Louis, where we discovered the classic architectural landmark Union Station. Another year it was at Mount Shasta, where we took a mountain hike. Another time it was the picturesque Danish village of Solvang, California.

Easter Celebrations on the Road

In each of these locations, we would decorate an Easter tree. That’s right, we’d hang plastic eggs and other ornaments on a tree somewhere at each of the locations we visited on Easter — our own little family tradition. And since these trees were always in public places, we’d sometimes get some approving reactions from the public — nobody ever frowned on it. In St. Louis, we were right downtown, so plenty of cars were passing by, with drivers honking their horns and giving us a thumbs up.

And this year, here we were catching up with Kimberly’s Aunt Linda and cousin Lori, relatives whom we’ become acquainted with only recently.

Birthday Party with Cousins

Lori really got into the spirit of the occasion; but what she enjoyed even more was her birthday, which came a couple of days later. For that milestone, we all went to Chuck E Cheese, and had a blast with all the little games. Who isn’t a sucker for carnival games, especially when you can compete against each other. We were joined by Lori’s sister Dawn, who lives a pretty good drive away, and whom we’d met only a couple of times previously.

The good news stateside was that the pandemic had mostly subsided, so we were able to go to places like this without social distancing or masks. The bad news was that the pandemic left in its wake a monstrous surge of inflation, driving up gas past 6 dollars per gallon in some parts of California. Oh, and the Dollar Tree now should be called the Dollar Twenty-Five Tree, because that was the new standard price of its merchandise. (Inflation is a global problem, of course, and every country is affected; it’s just more apparent in the U.S. because everything was already so dang expensive to begin with.)

We also visited a family friend who had her own little birthday celebration for Lori.– yum, more sweets. While in that neighborhood, we took a walk and came upon a “dog library”, with a pile of sticks people could take from or add to for the benefit of their canines.

This was particularly funny to us, because we’d made frequent use of those “little free libraries”, especially common in California, to pick up free reading material (and sometimes divest our RV of some excess weight). In fact, one book Kimberly picked up from one of these little kiosks was what started the gears turning on our international travels.

The volume was a travel guide to Cambodia, which we’d always wanted to visit (Kimberly in particular especially after reading the Travel Guide), so it occurred to us that with COVID shutting our business down, maybe this was the time to think about it in earnest. Meanwhile, Dennis had adopted a book about volunteering as a way to travel. Putting these two elements together, we began to form a plan.

Of course, Cambodia was not our immediate destination — we started out very far from there, in Central and South America. But Southeast Asia was still on our bucket list. And we did make it there eventually. And quite fittingly, it’s the country we’ve spent the most time in during the past 3 years, and it has even become our de facto home.

And it’s a country we’d be returning to as soon as we’d finished this jaunt through the United States.

3/20-25/2023