Time frame: May 27 – July 6
Miles Driven: 2256

After a couple months of being still in central Texas with a lot of social time, it was time to get back into motion. Our impending plans seemed to be calling us towards heading to St. Louis for Gateway Burn, and then traveling westward through Canada.  However, on the morning we were pulling out of Austin to head to Burning Flipside (the regional Burning Man event near Austin), I got a call from my parents that my father had just been diagnosed with lung cancer.

It was crushing news, to say the least – and all plans were put on hold. We played things day by day, ready to head to Florida when needed as we awaited more test results to let us know what we were dealing with.

Burning Flipside – San Gabriel, TX

We had been sticking around Texas through May because we had been able to procure tickets to the Austin regional Burning Man event. It’s the largest regional, with about 2500 people in attendance. It’s so popular, that they only have ticket sales for one week – and then they have a lottery to draw who gets tickets.  We had been greatly looking forward to checking this event out.

Obviously, with the news of my father, we went into the event with less enthusiasm.  We were graciously invited to camp with our St. Louis burner community who had put together a camp called ‘Starship Inner Thighs’. It was great to camp with people we know, and we had a great time serving drinks at our community starship bar.

Burning Flipside is a fabulous event, and we highly recommend it. It’s large enough to attract larger scale art projects, but yet small enough that you can actually see it all. Our favorite part was that the San Gabriel River runs through the land, so hot afternoons were spent chilling in the river rapids.

Austin

After Flipside we headed back to Austin to pick up Kiki from her cat sitter.  As my father’s biopsy result was due back in the coming days, we opted to stick around Austin for a couple days before making a decision if we should head on to St. Louis or go directly to Florida.

This gave us the opportunity to hang out more with my brother and his wife, as well as Brice & Rose of TackyTexans, who did henna art on my feet.

The biopsy results on my dad turned out to be inconclusive at this point, and seeing as he had more testing to be done before he was even scheduled to meet with a surgeon, we figured we likely had just enough time to get to St. Louis before heading to Florida.

St. Louis

We had a few reasons why attending Gateway Burn was such a high priority for us.  For one, the St. Louis burner community has thus far been most welcoming of us nomadic folks. When we attended last year, we immediately felt appreciated and included – and then they further invited Camp Nomadia into their fantastic placement at Burning Man later in the summer. The organizers this year decided that they wanted to be a nomad friendly regional burn, and went to great lengths to write their rules in such a way that if following their rule of ‘Leave the pets at home‘ meant bringing them with you – that they would allow nomadic pets to attend. So Kiki was super excited to get to attend her first burn!

We had also put a lot of effort into inviting other nomads to join us at the event – and we had assembled a smaller Camp Nomadia. We ended up having a bit of a NuRVer’s repeat in St. Louis with Ben & Karen and Sam & Tracy (ZenNomads) converging with us.  I also had a dear friend and custom jeweler, Barb, and her daughter, Wendy, who were former full time sailing nomads come out from Philadelphia to join us for their first burn event.

It turned out that everyone was converging in St. Louis a week prior to Gateway, so we would get an opportunity to share one of our favorite cities with some of our favorite people! We took our nomadic tribe to the top of the St. Louis arch and to the ever awesome City Museum.

Barb has also developed a fascination with Gooey Butter Cakes, which seem to be a regional thing in St. Louis that spread to Philadelphia. So Chris’ mom graciously got out her family recipes and hosted a Gooey Butter Cake Extravaganza in which we all spent an afternoon baking. As you might imagine, these cakes are gooey and buttery.. and they’re also super sweet.  No one in their right mind should ever attempt to eat this much gooey butter richness!

Gateway Burn

Our nomadic tribe left St. Louis and caravanned down to Camp Zoe near Salem, MO for Gateway Burn. After some adventurous driving navigating 3 RVs down steep dirt mountain roads – we arrived to Camp Nomadia.

The land where the event was held was fabulous, and also featured a stream suitable for floating and swimming. This helped make the hot afternoons a delight.

Gateway had about 200 folks this year, double what it had last year. The land will give them a lot of room to grow the event and perhaps become a major regional event. It was lovely to be with our St. Louis friends and introduce our nomadic tribe.

Kiki also had a great time sporting her elwire harness!

Melbourne, FL

On the way into Gateway Burn, my father finally received results from his PET scan and had talked to his surgeon. The cancer appeared to be contained and not spread, but needed to come out ASAP. Surgery would be scheduled in just a few days to remove at least one lobe of his lung.

We left Gateway Burn in a bit of a hurry on Sunday morning so that we could make a mad dash to Florida. We wanted to arrive in time to spend some quality time with my folks before the surgery, and get settled in.  After driving through the night with a couple stops for long naps, we made it to Melbourne in time for dinner on Monday.  We set up camp and it was off to surgery early Wednesday morning.

The placement of my dad’s tumor unfortunately necessitated taking his entire right lung, but the good news is – so far, it looks like there was no spreading, and my father will not need further treatments. He’s been making great progress on healing, and will have several months of adapting to life with one lung.  Apparently John Wayne did it, and so can my dad!

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We’ve not done much else while in Florida but spend time with my family, a few friends, catching up on some projects, getting the truck maintenance caught up and juggling logistics of reorganizing the software business I run with my folks to glide my father into retirement to fully enjoy this life he was just gifted.

Interesting times ahead for us as I go back to being more involved in the business than I have been in the past couple of years.

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