Surprise! We’re in St. Louis!

I haven’t mentioned the primary reason I am thankful that our stay in Austin got extended.

The Roller Coaster Ride

No, this part isn’t about some awesome amusement park we went to.

If you’ve been following along this year, than you probably already know that ‘something’ was up with my dad’s health at the beginning of the year.  If you’ve been a reader for more than a couple years, than you might have even put two and two together.

In March, we got news that his tests showed a miraculous complete response to treatments.

That… was a very good day.

We tentatively started thinking about where was next, and eventually headed to Texas. My parents plotted an epic road trip for the summer, and we were plotting where to rendezvous.

But the doc wanted one more round of tests before declaring remission.. and the results were due last Monday. I was a bit of a basket case all weekend long anxiously waiting (which we focused into writing our Mobile Connectivity Post), and thankful to still be near friends.

We hoped we had more time before the next reoccurrence. But instead of their big road trip, it’s now at least a few more months of treatments.

(Reminder: If there’s something you want to do… WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR ?!?!)

*sigh*

Yes, it’s not the news we wanted – and yes, we’ve been pretty bummed.

But the fight goes on and we are staying positive!

(It seems every time we tell someone what is up, we hear another story of someone else going through something similar. Our thoughts go out to everyone dealing with this sucky stuff too.)

Your continued positive thoughts, prayers, energy, or whatever you have to share – are most definitely still appreciated and requested.

Change of Plans

It’s kinda eery. Two years ago, we got the news of the initial lung cancer diagnosis just as we were heading from Austin to Gateway Burn near St. Louis.  Sound familiar?

I just could not bring myself to repeat that pattern this time.

Serendipity however was speaking pretty clearly by giving us all sorts of alternate nudges.

There was of course the invitations to visit some fellow bus nuts.

And there was also an out-of-the-blue invite from Catherine’s Landing to come stay for free to review their RV Resort facilities in Hot Springs, AR.

It was an easy decision to sell our Gateway Burn tickets and follow serendipity instead.

We enjoyed a couple of days in Hot Springs at the resort (we’ll have a full review soon, as well as some thoughts on an ideal RV spot) – and got into town for a much needed hot mineral bath soak at Quapaw Baths.

We love Hot Springs National Park – the only national park where you’re officially invited to get naked!

Planning A Surprise

And then the idea manifested – as our weekend was now open, let’s plot a surprise!

Chris’ parents were already expecting us mid-week to arrive in St. Louis in time for his grandma’s 90th birthday party.  But now we could arrive on Father’s Day.

Planning a surprise arrival might have been easy in the days before GPS tracking and social networks.  But this required a touch more effort.

First of all, we had to convince them we were sticking around Hot Springs for a few days.  We told his parents stories about kayaking, mineral baths and hiking – when in fact, we were driving the final legs into town.

Little white lies to parents?  Yeah, that’s the easy part.  The difficult part was all this gosh-darn technology that we’ve invited to track us!

We use Apple’s Find my Friends app to share our GPS location with trusted friends – which include our parents.  So we had to turn that off, giving them an undisclosed location message about out whereabouts.

We also had to implicate you into this farce.

Look over there on the right sidebar of the blog – we display our current location (updated by Google Latitude) and our projected travel ‘plans’ (our public Google Calendar which his parents are subscribed to).  We had to turn off auto updating of our location, and we totally lied about our travel plans.  (We could just claim ‘Nomadic Standard Time’ on this… but nope, this was intentionally misleading!)

We also didn’t keep up with our normal live updates from the road on Facebook. I guess we could have lied to y’all too about our non-existent kayaking adventures. But based on past experience, someone would ask for more details and catch us red handed.

Sunday afternoon we arrived in town and parked at a nearby lot to unhitch the Mini.  Chris called his dad to wish him a Happy Father’s Day (and told him about all the great kayaking we had done that morning in Hot Springs… hah hah hah).

And then 5 minutes later the rumble of a 2-stroke Detroit Diesel broke the silence in their neighborhood as we pulled into their driveway.

Surprise!!

What’s Next?

We’re in St. Louis for at least a week or two.  We honestly haven’t figured it out from there.  We may try some mid-west meandering for a short bit.

But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if we find ourselves eventually heading towards, oh… Florida?  Because really, where else am I gonna want to be?

But ugh… summer?  Hurricanes? Possibly no fellow nomads to hang with (because they’re all smart enough to head to cooler temps)?