EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

Diane: Welcome to Dropping In everybody. We’re so happy to have you with us today for Dropping In where we’ll do a spontaneous deep dive into the subject of identity. We’re going to try to surface diverse stories about who we are at heart. Today we’re here with Gerri Almand, author of the chock-a-block and fantastic memoir The Reluctant RV Wife. In preparing and thinking about our conversation today with Gerri I began to wonder about the abbreviation for identity which is ID. As a verb if you ID someone you identify them. I got to thinking about ID and ID the word ID which was part of Freud’s scheme of the Id, the ego and the superego.

I started thinking about Gerri’s book and this journey that she took unwillingly, reluctantly into an RV, a container that she never pictured herself in. She found an uncovering, a way of finding herself going back into her maybe more deeper states of awareness. We’ll let her tell you about that but almost back to and I thought almost back to an Id state. The Id is the first component of personality in Freud’s theory. Everybody’s born with the Id. It’s the one part of your personality that’s present from birth. It’s the primal and instinctual component and it’s entirely unconscious.

If you’re watching a little child or an infant play they’re governed by their Id. they want the toy. They want the bottle. They want the food. They want the mother. Nothing is mediating between these urges. The Id seeks to satisfy its demands primarily for short-term pleasure. It’s active again in childhood and some would say in artists who don’t curb the urges necessarily but go from stream of consciousness. Freud compared the personality to an iceberg. What you see above the waterline is actually just a tiny piece of the entire thing and most of us is hidden under the water. The tip of the iceberg represents our conscious awareness and the bulk of it symbolizes the unconscious where all of our hidden desires, thoughts and memories exist. I’m going to make the little argument or suggest that Gerri’s journey actually tapped into some of her very early memories and early urges to seek freedom and perhaps even the non-material world.

In his 1933 book Freud described the Id as a dark inaccessible part of our personality as we grow older. The only real way to observe it is to study the content of dreams or neurotic behavioral clues. Let’s set those aside a second. Have you ever dreamed of an open road, have you ever dreamed of flying, have you ever dreamed of being completely untethered. This is I think what Freud’s talking about in terms of Id urges which he compared to a cauldron of seething excitations. We like that. It has no real organization. How do the Id and the ego and the other parts of the personality, the super ego interact. Freud compared their relationship to that of a horse and a rider. The horse provides the energy that drives them forward so that’s the Id but it’s the rider, the ego and the superego that’s the laws of our society, the rules that we live by and also ego quests which is more mental, cerebral kind of process. The rider guides these powerful movements from the Id to determine our direction. Sometimes the rider may lose control and the horse which is the Id finds that they’re in control and the rider is simply going along for the ride.

Today’s guest Gerri Almand, I would say found herself along for the ride of a lifetime. We’ll find out what happens if we’re able to slow down, let ourselves wander and return to some of our Id’s basic urges. I’ll give you a little bit about her story. Gerri Almand was a well-established and well-respected master gardener and toastmasters speaker. She lives, lived in we’re going to get an update on that in Tampa, Florida. She is the author of this award-winning book traveling along with Gerri in The Reluctant RV’s Wife was an Amazon new release in senior travel guides bestseller at number one. It’s an honest and poignant book that was a Royal Palm Literary Award winner in 2018 and most recently won the 2019 SUNNY Awards from Sunbury Press. It’s published by Brown Posy Press and this book can be ordered wherever paperbacks and e-books are sold including the Big A Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can find Gerri at gerrialmand.com. We’re going to be able to talk to her live and in person.

First we’re going to find out where is where is Gerri. Where in the world is Gerri right now? Gerri, hello. Great to be with you. Welcome to the show. How you doing and where are you?

Gerri: Good morning Diane. I am so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Right now I am in a little town just north of Beaumont, Texas called Vidor. We got here late yesterday afternoon having left the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. We are in route now to the Big Bend National Park in southern Texas travelling about in our RV.

Diane: Okay, well this is this is a vacation that we’re going to take vicariously through your trip I should say. You point out the difference between vacations, traveling and living in your book which I thought were great differentiations but we’ll travel with you today. Tell me what it looks like out your window. What are you seeing out the window in Beaumont, Texas?

Gerri: Bright, clear skies. The trees are bursting out, the oak trees are blooming. The wind is blowing. It is a very crisp maybe 48 or 50 degrees out there. It’s pretty cold.

Diane: Wow but it feels good right? It’s good sleeping weather I would imagine.

Gerri: Oh absolutely.

Diane: Good. Well I’m here to report since I’m talking to you from St. Petersburg, Florida that we’ve got the same weather here so maybe minus the wind and the beautiful trees and obviously that big bend in the river. Gerri, I’m going to look and just continue this little intro for a moment. I think that we will speak about this kind of uncovering and excavation process that you went through and kind of a transition really in your whole personality. I thought while I was reading your book that one of the things that helps to bring something like this about, a total transformation is some sense of peace and letting go of expectations. Expectations cling to us like fly paper. It’s almost impossible to let go of them but as the Buddha says suffering is created by pre expecting certain outcomes.

I have always noticed when I was boating with my parents on the Chesapeake as a young girl. I would step onto the boat and I would just automatically kind of power down and basically expect nothing to happen which I think is a childhood adjustment. It’s harder to make as an adult when you’ve got that many more responsibilities, that many more expectations, more time clock, more schedules, more to-do lists, everything going on in your head but I wondered about this idea of powering down almost metabolically so that something like watching a sunset becomes an event rather than a backdrop to life.

Your RV, your recreational vehicle. I kind of broke down that word recreational. It allows you to recreate yourself. I mean you had this kind of peace, this kind of absence of the usual anxieties. I would say you substituted other anxieties on the road obviously survival being one of them. I just wanted to hear from you. You quite unexpectedly went on a journey that you never expected to be on. How you then drew on I think some of your earlier experiences. As a youth you had several trips to Europe and a cross-country trip on a motorcycle with only the essentials. Early on you enjoyed the kind of striped down simplicity. I think you either have that or you don’t.

You read on Walden’s Pond by Henry David Thoreau. You kind of had a kind of mental place that maybe you logged on and left at a certain point but it was there. I think maybe the first time I really felt clued into this is when you arrived in Graceland. You arrived in Graceland via the RV. You didn’t want to set foot into and what happened there? You rediscovered Elvis Presley. What was that like to get in touch with like an early girlhood infatuation?

Gerri: You know what? It was wonderful but I want to go back to your very opening when you talk about your Id. If anyone had asked me before a couple of years ago who are you? At my core I would have said I’m a social worker. That was my passion, that was my life focus. I spent 40 years practicing social work. The master gardening and the toastmasters really came after I retired. I think there’s something about retirement that means kind of letting go. It really helps one live in the moment as opposed to blowing on the past or focusing on the future.

I think retirement almost demands that one slow down. They’re no longer the time constraints, the demands of showing up at a certain time. Retirement means that you perhaps can sleep when you’re tired, eat when you’re hungry, sit and do nothing when you feel like doing that. RV’ing however takes everything to a different level. It truly requires that you live in the moment.

Diane: I love that.

Gerri: Throughout that first book The Reluctant RV Wife, I was struggling to find the meaning of this. I wanted to know how does this fit in. What is the kind of philosophical or spiritual framework to put this in. Only recently has it come to mind for me what it all means. In a sense I heard Bob Wells who is the author of the YouTube podcast Cheap RV Living. He is a guru of the RV world. He has done a lot of research into spirituality, anthropology, science, all of these different disciplines. He talks a lot about Carl Young. You started off talking about some of these psychoanalytical theories and Freud particularly.

Bob Wells talked about Carl Young and the archaic man archive but then Bob Well takes it on back to anthropology and the hunters and the gatherers. Bob Wells has concluded after years of research that RV living is the natural state for man. It is the closest to what our DNA has programmed us to do. It is the most natural way of being. Throw in my long fascination and then this minimalism and then suddenly this RV lifestyle makes perfect sense. I stand inside my little RV and I can almost find everything in the world I need or want within arm’s reach.

Diane: This is a beautiful thing and you did read Marie Kondo while you were trying to purge yourself of your void. I didn’t mean to Gerri, we know one another a little bit kind of as neighbors and authors. I didn’t mean to overlook your 40 years as social work. Maybe I was just existing completely in the present but I had sort of taken that as a kind of launch pad that a part of our conversation can have a psychological, anthropological, social, sociology platform because you have an understanding of this. It’s not surprising to me that you have connected with a way of having a big picture of what you’re doing out there and to me that makes it just all the more interesting.

I feel as though in getting back to the corny, cheapy part, the tacky part. No offense to Elvis, who I understand is a demigod but you had this kind of unfinished business I felt like you went to Graceland. There’s a word like grace land, a world where you find grace. It’s this opening. You’ve gotten into this RV. You’re not sure why. You haven’t yet found Mr. Wells. You’ve not got an overarching concept which by the way it sounds perfectly logical to me that you would be closest to the natural state of hunting and gathering. It makes perfect sense what you said but you mentioned in your book that you get to Graceland and you start to realize that while you had had this great love for Elvis wasn’t shared by your husband with whom you were traveling but okay.

It was a kind of touchdown to your youth but it wasn’t cool for you to grieve Elvis when he died when you were that age because you had to go on marches and protests and you had things to do and sociologically important things to do. Then I thought well, it kind of revives something in yourself where it’s like oh there was a love that I kind of left off with in order to go about the business of my life. Somehow it felt like you kind of came alive a little bit that segment of the first trip where you’d been dragged kicking and screaming into the RV. Whether you felt as though, you say on page 87 you felt you had discovered a lost inner child. I think this is something, there’s something to that, the unfettered passions of your youth.

By the way this book is full of great writing that you’ve then got a sign. You’re leaving Graceland. You’ve got the Elvis cup because of course you had to get a memento from the occasion. You’ve got the Elvis cup with the coffee. You put it on the back bumper of the RV. Hook up everything and take off and everybody forgets about the cup of coffee. You get out of the RV and it’s there.

Gerri: That was such an amazing true story. The book by the way is a hundred percent true. I think when you write a memoir if you’re not one hundred percent honest that ingenuity, that ingenuousness comes through to the reader. I think you have to be honest and at times I was painfully honest. My husband thinks I was too painfully honest in places but in any case I think when you are removed from your normal familiar surroundings like being at home with everything known to you that you can pretty much predict what the afternoon is going to bring or what the evening is going to bring.

When you’re traveling like this you’re just wide open to see things in new kinds of ways and to make connections that weren’t there before. I think maybe there’s a lot of mythology about going to Graceland and what it does and the redemption that is possible when you get there. I think maybe I did have that kind of experience in Graceland. It did awaken a lot of stuff that I had completely not even known were buried there.

Diane: I feel as though you were so self-candid not just the honesty of the memoir but you were very scrutinizing of yourself in a very I think very honest way. You talk about some of your unconscious regrets that stem from a little bit after your teenage years. You thought of going into the Peace Corps and you’re going to exotic, unheard of locations. I think ultimately and you were really thrilled about this idea of going into the unknown which strikes me you’re kind of waking up now. You were dissuaded by your parents who might have had your best well-being at heart but nonetheless that was again lodged in your unconscious somewhere. You wanted to go out. You wanted to go away. You wanted to do something fun. I wonder about retrieving that that thread too and are you journaling all of these connections that you’re making while you’re RV’ing.

Gerri: I am writing two or three hours a day on the road but going back to that RV guru Bob Wells. I heard him speak recently and his opening was I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I never felt like I fit in. I felt like when I had this nine to five job and the sticks and stones house and this routine that I was somehow being forced into a mold that wasn’t, that I didn’t quite fit into.

Diane: Good. I’m going to ask you to pause for a second. We’re into some juicy information. We’re going to pause for a short break here which is necessary to keep our show going but I want to come back to the idea that you found out it was okay not to belong and maybe you were always an outsider. Don’t go away. We’re going to come back with Gerri Almand who’s really outside. Don’t go away. We’ll be right back on Dropping In.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Gerri Almand, author of the really riveting and fun book The Reluctant RV Wife. She’s on the road currently. She’s speaking to us from Beaumont, Texas where she’s traveling with her husband in her RV. I happen to know the author’s, I met the author’s husband on book tour where Gerri was speaking. This was an idea that was presented, totally blindsided Gerri.

I think we’ve all had this experience in a partnership where the person you’re with comes home and says well, here it is, the most wonderful next thing and you’re caught totally unawares because you never thought about the RV, you never thought about the monster dog, you never thought about traveling on a barge or picking up stakes and going on a bicycle tour of Australia, you know things that kind of come out of the blue that Gerri has landed on her own two feet and has actually found a way of not only making sense of this but actually expanding on the experience by finding a framework in which to think about it. One of the things we were just talking about is belonging and realizing that maybe you Gerri were always comfortable as an outsider and maybe you wouldn’t have realized that had you not gone on this voyage.

Gerri: Well I think we all have common human needs but I think too that we are all so unique it’s hard to fit in. It’s hard to find community sometimes particularly in such a complex fast paced society that we live in today. What I’m finding though is a community of like-minded people out here on the road living as nomads, living as gypsies, traveling from place to place with no particular destination and finding community within this kind of an RV village. In fact there are virtual communities. Our village happens to be one of them. I am just learning so many things about this lifestyle that I think most people out there have no idea that it even exists. I know I did not until I’m getting more and more immersed into it.

We’ve been on the road this time about three weeks and already I have just learned so much more about this lifestyle and what it means and what it’s really about than I ever knew before.

Diane: It’s probably got a lot of layers to it and you’ll always be able to take off another layer and go to it’s almost infinite. I do want you to attach some we say fingers and toes to this. Give us some stats. When you say this community which it sounds fabulous to embrace and of course none of us, we had no idea it exists. When you’re talking about the virtual like your village, your community, how many people are we talking about that are out there on the road as nomads. Is there a number you can give us and demographics?

Gerri: Well we’ve just joined a group called the Escapees, people who are primarily full-time on the road. I think this has over 2000 members connected via Facebook and a website. Our village in contrast I think and don’t quote me on this but I’m thinking it’s almost 100,000 people who are hooked up to our village, a virtual community. They have rallies. We just attended a five-day rally at the Spirit of the Suwanee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida when we left home. There were I think they estimated about 1500 volunteers who were all there. It was volunteer-based non-profit organization. They had musical entertainment, several different venues every night. They had these huge firebirds they called them metal sculptures that they filled with firewood and they would glow in the dark.

Diane: I mean this is sounding like burning man or something.

Gerri: Educational seminars.

Diane: It’s sounding very like people who flock together for something like burning man or it’s a kind of a support group for one thing but it’s also symbolic of a community that needs to feel those bombs as you go out. It’s not always easy to do.

Gerri: Historic integration is focused on building community among nomads. Historically I think from anthropology the most efficient sized band for a group would be 150 people at max. If you bring several thousand people together or even several hundred for some kind of rally you have all of these planned activities so that you’re reduced down to smaller groups of 20 or 25 people with opportunities for bonding, for getting to know each other, for building friendships and making connections that are going to continue probably electronically after you go your separate ways but then with plans to reconvene later down the road. Maybe you’ll both find yourself in the Portland, Oregon area up or up in British Columbia who knows? You stay in touch online and then you reconnect in a planned way later on down the road.

Diane: Just to play devil’s advocate for a minute because I think you kept it real in the book so well that at one point you were talking about um the physical groups that caravan together and you were on a journey in which everyone had a set routine each day. You and Michael preferred to sleep in to 8 or 8:30. These guys were up and out by seven and it became really kind of awkward to manage being in a group all the time. You were kind of sort of I think maybe it’s more appealing in a way to deal with people virtually who there’s a set boundary. You have the freedom maybe you’ll hook up again, maybe you’ll see one another in Portland. Maybe this, maybe that but in the meantime you can share thoughts. You don’t have to get in the same daily routine and yet they’re there for you. You’re there for them. I think you’re probably a very valued member. You’re probably somebody they think wow, we hit the jackpot. Gerri Almand is with us. You have this background.

Gerri: I think RVers as a group tend to be fiercely independent, pretty self-reliant. I don’t want to say they’re loners but they certainly are comfortable within themselves and can be alone. I think being able to be comfortable while alone would be one way of characterizing RVers. We I don’t think herd well in groups.

Diane: It’s like herding RVers, herding cats. Cats can’t manage it. Please, go ahead. The beautiful thing, we don’t want to not hear that. What is the beautiful thing beyond what you already said?

Gerri: The beautiful thing about being a part of a virtual community is that you can pick and choose. It’s not like living on my little street in my subdivision in Tampa where I am stuck with this immediate surrounding. I can pick and choose my immediate surroundings in the RV.

Diane: Exactly and no offense to the neighbors but let’s put it this way they are unavoidable. You go outside to the mailbox. You may or may not want to be talking. As you say this is giving you an element of control and selectivity. It’s just a very fun, kind of modern take on RVing too. I think wow, you’re connected. I think the other thing I have to say when I noticed in your book. You defined yourself a certain way and maybe that’s why I brought it up so soon in your intro. You were a master gardener. When you purged to, when you realized that you and Michael were going to take bigger steps and take longer trips on the road, the number of orchids alone that you had to throw away was like 20. I’ve never managed one orchid. You were a master gardener and as you put it so poetically you had roots in your garden. Your garden was your activity, your identity, your energy. That changed from where you are now Gerri.

Gerri: Well first of all there were 200 orchids not 20.

Diane: The ones you threw away but the thriving ones were no, there was a whole city of orchids. You sold them to your neighbor or you sold them to…

Gerri: To orchid clubs and the master gardeners they’re going anyway. In any case what I have learned Diane and the bottom line is that the more of my possessions that I rid myself off the more free I am. There’s nothing like that feeling of being untethered. I absolutely love that when I am out on the road with no particular destination or actually we do have a destination right now. We’re going to Big Bend national park but we are not on a time schedule. We leave when we are ready to leave and we stay if we feel like staying. It’s just a lack of expectations and the freedom to live in the moment.

Diane: So cool. You mentioned that being off the grid at first it felt scary. You were in your comfort zone back in the garden. Now you’ve emerged as a free bird and I think in a very beautiful way you’ve emerged but I think there were several times where the stop in the book was Michael saying well let’s go. You were like the garden, the plants. What am I going to do? It’s interesting to me the way you were tethered, tethered, tethered and it gave you some time to think through this thing. It gave you a way of kind of having one foot in one foot out. Then finally you let go and here you are. You really let go. Do you think now that you have a new comfort zone, that now your comfort zone is actually in the RV and on the road? Is that fair to say?

Gerri: Well it’s interesting that you say that. I have a second manuscript that’s currently with an editor and the name of that book is going to be Home is Where the RV Is.

Diane: As opposed to home is where the…

Gerri: The next of my series of books about RV travel I have realized I have completely made that transition, that this is home now, that I have pretty much lost attachment to everything in my house back in Tampa, Florida. I’m letting it all go.

Diane: You realized you’d taken on things unwillingly or unwittingly I should say because I’m just in the process of emptying my mother’s house now. I know you can relate to this but in the book as you’re purging several things were things that came from your mom and of course through sentimental value you feel you have to take them on. Now you’ve reached the point where first, you pass them on to your daughter so thanks a lot mom.

Gerri: That’s right.

Diane: I mean I think that’s right you did that. You did the generational thing but I love this idea of being without material trappings and realizing them for what they are because in the meanwhile there’s so many of us that are caught up like we’re hamsters on a wheel. We’re attaining and acquiring and all that. You’ve basically gotten off that wheel.

Gerri: As Bob Wells, the RV guru put it we have traded traveling like nomads, hunters and gatherers in tents and now we’re doing it in rolling steel tents which I think is a very clever way of putting it. It’s a 21st century migration relocation in with our tents, only our tents have become something a little more sophisticated. Although it’s a return to a more simple basic lifestyle trust me I would be lost if anyone took my electronics away from me. You should know that the RV industry now is marketing to millennials. These new RVs coming off the assembly lines have more USB ports than they have electrical plugs.

Diane: Any other considerations for millennials just the USB ports. In Brooklyn they’re going back to analog. Everything’s got time faces now but I mean I think that’s fascinating because of course millennials may well want to jump on the bandwagon.

Gerri: There’s so many people out here on the road living and working full time in their RVs. So many computer backup systems, solar energy, generators, everything else. People who can work remotely full time in their RVs off the grid in the middle of the desert. It’s incredible. There are families with children growing up with no fixed address, being homeschooled, attending virtual schools online, maintaining multiple daily contacts with their best friends through Skype. It’s an interesting, we’re discovering so much about this mobile community out here.

Diane: It’s a brave new world. It kind of brings tears to my eyes in a way that like wow, technology really made good on one of the promises to potentially free us up if we’re willing. It must mean then you’re getting Wi-Fi access out there as well which that sounds promising considering how provincial Wi-Fi access can be. I do want to talk though because I think we almost touched on it before a generational, I love that you’re seeing both young and old and this new concept of growing up without an address. Wow, this is mind-boggling and pushing another frontier all together. I wonder about a kind of generative point that you are in your life of discovering because you are in what Erickson called the generative phase.

When we come back, we’re going to take another short break but when we come back we’re going to understand a little bit about creating things and nurturing things that will outlast us but also making our mark which is what I would argue Gerri Almand is doing by writing her books and taking us with her on the journey as The Reluctant RV Wife. No longer reluctant is the final chapter of the book and there’s another book in the works. Don’t go away. We’re going to come back with Gerri Almand very soon and pick up the conversation about how to live without an address.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Gerri Almand who’s in Beaumont, Texas in her RV. She is the author of a chock-a-block memoir called The Reluctant RV Wife. She has another book in the works. We’re talking today about youth, about how there’s a movement afoot, about how Gerri and her husband found themselves doing something they individually desired but found themselves actually on the frontier of a movement, that there are thousands of people living on the road without an address, homeschooling children, conducting business and careers from remote locations and through technology and virtual communities not sacrificing a sense of neighborhood.

Gerri, it’s so great talking to you. I really think that you have crossed a threshold into I don’t know a kind of prototypical existence. It’s kind of so exciting. You reached a point where which you described in the book 2011. You’ve now realized your mortality because while we’re talking about youth you and I are of a generation, the generative generation late middle age. We are interested in making a mark. We’re interested in giving back. We are also facing through watching our parents and the end-of-life issues with parents starting to realize our own mortality and as you said from Janice Joplin we better get it while we can.

I think when you take off in the RV it almost feels like you’re saying to death and mortality oh, I’m not going to sit there rooted to the ground with the orchids going, going deeper toward my grave which was a great illusion you made. I’m going to get on the road so catch me if you can. Here’s to it. You’re kind of inspiring us to seek freedom and to seek a kind of a different, a non-material world. What that feels like but we are in a generative stage. I wonder if you reflect on that in terms of does it feel like you said this feels right at a deep, it resonates at a deep part of your core. Do you think it’s also part of a life passage that you’re going through or maybe not. I just wonder about that.

Gerri: Well first I don’t think that I’m a part of the frontier of this RV travel. I feel like I’ve almost come very late to the dance. I think there are people out here who would look at me and my book The Reluctant RV Wife and think oh my goodness. What a newbie. She doesn’t know anything yet or maybe she never will learn. In terms of the generative stage of life and what I’m doing at this point at 72 years of age. I never dreamed I’d get so old. All my life I’d wanted to be a writer. I found social work in my very early 20s and my goodness I forgot about writing although in retrospect I did spend 40 years writing because as a social worker I wrote social developmental history, psychosocial evaluations, investigative reports for the court system.

I in a sense spent 40 years writing but it wasn’t until I retired when I said a-ha, this is my time. I’m going to focus on writing. My husband laughingly claims credit for my book. He said until we got that RV you didn’t have anything to say. I mean please but in any case the RV did indeed. I found my voice. I finally found a niche for something that I connected with, something that I could make I could use storytelling skills to get across. I could incorporate humor and I could introduce a large segment of the population out there to experience that that he probably didn’t know much about. I hope I’m destroying the myth that tooling along the highway in a big RV is like a silver-haired retired persons, old geezer kind of thing to do because it’s not.

I cannot believe how many younger people are out here doing it nor can I believe how bright and interesting and with it the retirees are. It’s a different, I think say a unique subset sample of people. I think the people out here are so vibrant and alive and still interested and with it.

Diane: Pursuing their kind of instinct of you were saying about you eat when you want to. Your schedules are built on your own. I mean come on it’s getting vibrant again. It’s getting almost youthful again, kind of a rejuvenation. I think the writing I love the writing and that you’ve accessed, I think you always had something to say Gerri, always but this gave you a kind of a platform, a place to speak from figuratively and physically. I want to know like when’s the Netflix series is going to start because I also want to see. I want to see some of the stuff because I don’t want to necessarily leave the comfort of my home but I’m tempted with the book to do it. I am tempted. You’re completely inspirational and don’t discount what you’ve learned. I think it seems like you’ve learned a lot but I mean do you have any plans or I’d love to kind of see a series.

By the way to the audience if you ever get a chance to hear Gerri Almand on one of her book tour stops do it because as a toastmaster she’s wonderful speaker as you can tell but also provides a lot of scenic imagery and all kinds of images that fill in the gaps on this story. In The Reluctant RV Wife thankfully there’s a whole section of photographs that you can see. She and Michael tooling around and where you go. I just realized too that there’s so many directions that you can go. Do you think of anything visual above and beyond the writing which we love?

Gerri: Not yet. Perhaps it will come in the future. I am having the time of my life right now with the writing. This is my passion. I get up at five o’clock, 5:30 in the morning just in order to have several hours of time to think, to reflect and to write down my thoughts. I’d rather write than do anything else.

Diane: It shows.

Gerri: When I complete a manuscript, the tediousness of the revision and that all the work that goes into taking this completed manuscript to that level where it can be published. It’s just a lot of work. I wish somebody else could do that for me.

Diane: There’s virtual editors and we can go into that. I do think that you’ve found your gift with the writing for sure. Everyone out there including your husband must be taking in and storing a lot of these impressions but you’re articulating them. That’s what we appreciate so much. I want to get a little bit deeper into the idea that you’re not taking this journey alone. The journey is as you’ve talked extensively in the book it’s the journey outside. What you’re seeing, the weather conditions going through the Alaskan highway, the remoteness, the beauty, the starkness but it’s also the inner dynamics inside what you used to call sorry a tin can. You used to refer to these people as old coots. I love this quote. What was true once it’s not any longer true. We’ve found a new truth.

I think Michael, he was the initiator of all this. You talked about fear of well what would it be like to be essentially trapped inside the tin can, inside the RV with your husband for extended periods of time. Can you talk about how that journey’s turned out and your self-awareness from that experience?

Gerri: There are a lot of themes throughout the book I think. Changing situations in marriages for example. Retirement threw us both into tailspins. This RV threw us into tailspins. As we started traveling trying to live in I don’t know, 50 square feet of living space inside our little RV. That was challenging. I mean how in the world do you find privacy or a quiet time when you’re living that close with another human being. There are a lot of changes that were necessary with the marriage. I will say that it brought us a lot closer together. We worked them through and I’d say our marriage is stronger now than it ever was.

Diane: I love that.

Gerri: It also deals with a theme of aging and having our bodies failed. That first book about RV I was undergoing total knee replacements. I was in excruciating pain and we kept doing it. The last RV trip we took last year and this is talked about next in the series. My husband slipped down the RV steps and broke his leg when we were in Austin, Texas. We ended up spending five weeks in Austin. Then when we finally got off on the road again. When he was in a walking boot and could put some weight on the leg we went to Portland, Oregon, ended up spending five weeks there because he needed physical therapy.

I think this RV travel it just presents so many situations that require the flexibility. It requires you to regroup and adjust and adapt and be flexible and to keep on trucking. You end up feeling like such a survivor when you get through all of this, when you solve these problems these challenges, when you’re successful. You find out, you look around one day you’re just oh my God. I’m confident. I’m happy. I’m euphoric. This is what it’s supposed to be.

Diane: You did it together. It feels like a lesser person not survive it but I think you’re right. You face goals and exigencies together and you’re stronger for it because you mentioned about suburban life and drifting apart maybe not even knowing what each other did that afternoon whereas here you’re hands on. You’re in these projects together, surviving the leg. Oh we forgot to mention Gerri’s two new knees. The things that you survived they glued you in a way that a doing does and just abstractly being together doesn’t really cut it.

I think that you also talk about the mechanisms of how to survive walking away, pausing if there’s tension, the same kinds of things you do in your house but maybe it’s a little bit more extensive because you could walk conceivably two miles down the road and be in another place altogether mentally, a different space emotionally. We’re going to be closing very, very soon which is sad for me because I’ve enjoyed so much talking with you but I want to just see if you can sort of summarize this like your relationship to your husband, to yourself and to a community that you found. It seems as though these connective bonds you’ve made are somehow even stronger than ones that you find on land. You have about a minute to go. Any thought about that, how that comes about and what you’re feeling now?

Gerri: Well I think the RV triggered a lot of thought in terms of how I saw myself, what I wanted out of life. I think it helped me dig a little deeper and realize that maybe this was an opportunity rather than an albatross that was being thrown upon me. I think what this RV triggered was an openness to new experiences and somehow it has stimulated this almost unquenchable thirst for new experiences. I become just almost addicted to looking out this front windshield and looking up ahead and not knowing what’s there but wanting to know. Just wanting to keep on going to see what’s going on.

Diane: Great Gerri. Keep pushing, go deeper, get stronger. It’s Gerri Almand, The Reluctant RV Wife. Thank you Gerri for being with us today on Dropping In. We’ll see you next week.

Gerri: Thank you Diane.

Diane: Happy travels.

Thank you so much for dropping in. Please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.