Thank you for taking us on this wild ride!
Before I was ever a woman, I was a girl who married a boy fourteen years ago. I didn’t know much about life – I was comfortably miserable in my small world and terrified of adventure, the ocean and camping. He lived for all of these things. He packed a backpack on our honeymoon to Italy and I packed two suitcases. We continued on with life joking about how being opposites was fun but really, life was black and white with gray smeared on top. Two kids, separate dreams and twelve (very) opposite years later, we had fallen to our knees yet again, disconnecting and reconnecting in a tangled beautiful mess of highs and lows and a small fortune spent on therapy.
Somehow, with guidance and will, we held on just by letting go. I was loved at my worst, and, patiently, he got my best. This is where our Bowlus adventure begins even though we didn’t know it at the time. I realized I needed to “let go” and suddenly found myself wanting to do just that. Where could we go just the two of us that was so out of my box? I got out a map. Iceland. That will do just fine, thank you. There was one rule for this trip we considered our marriage salvation – no rules at all. Get on a plane, reserve a camper (seriously?) and get in it and go. No destination. No plan. No fear. Just the two of us and an Atlas. The old beater of a camper was adorned with a hodge-podge of old sheets. Not a single pillowcase matched another piece of bedding, and it was clear this thing had been lived in by a thousand other lives. Perfect. Just perfect. I needed to let go and suddenly this city girl was winging it in a beat-up camper with the name “Duke” etched on the side. Our whimsical plan of a trip was life changing. We were two lost souls married to the strangers in one another who managed to find each other and Duke was our vehicle. We set up picnics on the side of roads, laughed at how “lost” we’d get and hiked some of the most breathtaking parts of the Earth side by side. We slept through the cold nights huddled close in the mismatched sheets and dried off from natural hot springs with thin mismatched towels. As we returned Duke to the dealer, we promised him we would somehow reincarnate him in the States.
We picked up our Bowlus, in March of 2016 and began the first of many adventures. Duke (as we call it) has now been through 18 states, countless state parks, on a ferry to cross NY to VT, and even in front of the Biltmore estate! The Bowlus is elegant minimalism…it teaches our children how to respect the small space we share and to appreciate the art of living in the most beautiful, comfortable silver bullet under the canopy of a national forest. The folks at Bowlus have thought of it all, from the floor heating to the creative storage space, but they never knew how they would transform the lives of our family and re-energize our marriage. Thank you for taking us on this wild ride!