Casita #3,

Olé Vida, at

Grand Isle,

Louisiana in

2018

Déjà Vu All Over Again… Again

In the previous story, Déjà Vu All Over Again related how a second Casita travel trailer, El Gitano, came to be… and then there was a third.  Only months after selling the second one in May of 2017 because of my wife's inability to continue our travels due to her health, I was alone much sooner than expected.  Since so many of our good times were spent traveling, I very soon was looking at another Casita.  I wanted to revisit many of the special places that we had travelled to over our years on the road.  Because of an order cancellation at the Casita factory, a trailer exactly like the last one was coming out of production in a few weeks and I quickly claimed it.

As a result of spending three and a half years customizing (mods, to Casita owners) the previous one, I knew what I did and did not want to do to this one.  I also knew that I didn't want to spend three years getting these mods accomplished like before so I grabbed the first available spot at the then only commercial Casita “mod” installer and had nearly three years of work done in a single day.  The projects that this company couldn't do, I accomplished myself in the first three months of “travel moding” which is what I call working on the upgrades while on the road to various locations.  By early spring of 2018, with the Casita not yet six months old, virtually all of my projects were done and I had already towed the little trailer over 14,000 miles and visited 21 states.  By its first birthday, it had traveled 22,000 miles and crossed the borders of 27* states while spending over a third of my time (132 nights) on the road.

As an aside from this story, early on in my travels with the third Casita, I was rather abruptly reminded of the writings of Thomas Wolfe… “You Can't Go Home Again.”  He explains it with, "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."  Attempting to revisit past treasures that my late wife, Carolyn, and I had enjoyed together was a mistake.  Instead of savoring them as we had previously done, for me, many became episodes of varying degrees of disappointment and anguish.  What travel time I have left will be mostly devoted to new adventures or ones that don't carry so many remembrances.  The noted exception will be Eureka Srings, Arkansas.  This small, picturesque town is home to Ermillo's Italian Restaurant, the site of most of our anniversary dinners over the previous decade.

As another year progresses, my plans, though slower in pace than those of this past year, are to relax and enjoy some of the tiny corners of this country, some new and some old, all recognizing that it is true… you can't go home again.  Chica, the cat (the offspring of a farel cat that roamed near the house in Del Rio) more or less adopted me two years ago and has become my travel companion.  She is a great traveler and enjoys hours of surveying her new and changing surroundings.  

And so goes the continued travels in the third but what will certainly be the last of the string of Casitas.  There will be no Déjà Vu All Over Again… Again… Again

States visited in the first 12 months of Casita #3, Olé Vidá:  Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma,  Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico

Olé Vida is Spanish for "Hooray For Life."  It was the name we used on a succession of boats that dated back to the 70's.

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