To infinity and...to the Mother Earth News Fair!

Honestly, I am so funny sometimes it is not even, well, funny! For years I have dreamed of making a special trip for my 60th birthday. Actually I wanted to do it for my 50th but that was just not possible. This is a trip that I plan out and execute on my own. It's a time for me, for solitude and refreshment.

It has been an extremely busy, project heavy summer for me. I had a visit to plan for from Tim, Abbie, Josie and Toby in June, which was pure pleasure of course, directing our VBS program in July, starting a new Women's Bible Study at our church and teaching it twice a week, starting a new flock of meat birds, a new hive of bees, adding to our existing layer flock, the garden of course, completely cleaning our huge deck from years of neglect and hardened on mossy growth, then treating it properly, cleaning out our over-packed garage, Kids Kamp (a time spent with 8 awesome kids in our family), and I'm sure there's more. Finally I am coming to the point of completion of most of this work and can focus on my birthday trip.

Keep in mind here that my beloved "husb" and I are not what you'd call, "money-ed folk", so a trip would not ever be to some exotic locale or whatever. It's always going to be simple camping/roughing it on a shoestring type of stuff.

My trip plans involve heading to the Mother Earth News Fair September 21-23 for three wonderful days of packing my head with all manner of data about living in a more self-sustaining fashion. I am looking forward to workshops on fermented foods, the "poop" on keeping turkeys, small scale dairy, and wild foraging, as well as hearing great speakers like Temple Grandin, Joel Salatin, and Sandor Katz. I'll be camping out of our van at a nearby campground.

After the fair I plan to head to a state park that I have been wanting to visit for a peaceful four days in a yurt. It is surprisingly inexpensive off season. I will spend this time hiking, relaxing, reflecting, and probably pouring over all the books, handouts, and other info I pick up at the fair.

Why do I call that funny? It has to do with the way I plan a trip. It is August 9th and I already have my tickets purchased and my various reservations made and paid for. I have a trip folder started and it is already filled with my Mapquest maps and directions for each destination, workshop schedules for the fair, all reservation and email copies for each destination, as well as maps of those places, coupons clipped from the SaveAround book for restaurants in the various towns I'll be in, along with their menus and directions to each place! It's kind of amazing and kind of scary! But, it's the way I do things. I'm not joking when I say that, for me, the planning is literally half of the fun of a trip. That's probably why I hate surprise trips; half of the fun is totally missed!

Now, I can hear you saying, "Susie, what are you going to do if this all falls through?" Answer? Not a thing. One of the benefits of reaching 60 years old is that I no longer freak out when life throws a big huge monkey wrench into my plans. I will simply go on from there and plan again. Of course I hope that doesn't happen, but I am truly not the type of person to get all down, and/or angry, and/or miffed about things not turning out exactly as I planned.

My biggest obstacle at this point is the money to do this. I have alerted my little fam here in the house that gifts of birthday money prior to my actual birthday in November would be greatly appreciated. And my husband is a great big wonderful doll understanding my need for getaways like this, so the needs such as gas and so forth for the trip will be coming out of the household, but I'll need to gather enough spending money to take care of my needs, and of course to have at least a little fun. (sigh...) It'll happen...just gotta have faith.

So, there you have it. I'm kind of a strange duck? Yes? Agreed. But I'll tell you what; I like me! And that's more than most people in this world can honestly say these days.