It's as if we never left!

©2012 Lydia Hinshaw

 ORMOND BEACH, FL -- I was sitting in my cousin's dining room in St. Louis last Wednesday, when I was startled by a cell phone.  Since I was in a house with four, or was it five, 20- and 30-something women, I looked around to see whose phone it might be.
 Then I realized the Mozart was coming from my pocket.
 It was the child care director at the YMCA here, calling because she has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to hire a bus driver since I left five months ago.  I was 1,000 miles away, and I had thought I was safe from employment opportunities.
 Instead, 25 hours after pulling into our driveway Sunday, I was revving up the bus to visit two elementary schools to pick up 46 kids enrolled in the Y's after-school program.
 I had been looking forward to being unemployed for a few weeks at least, but it is hard to turn down the Y, where I spend a lot of time in the pool and the weight room, and the cardio room, and where I attend several exercise classes each week.  And where I have a lot of friends.  And where the administrators bend their rules to let me come back to work every fall without starting the application process from scratch.
  We were away from May 18 until Oct. 14. For two months, July and August, we were employed as shuttle bus drivers in Glacier National Park in Montana.  We took three or four weeks to get there, and six more to get home.
 Getting up in the morning in a campground, eating cold cereal in 40-degree weather and then setting out with no particular destination in mind is the most fun thing I've ever done.
 Our odometer reveals we traveled 14,920 miles.  We spent just five nights in motels, and nine other nights in various family lodgings in North Carolina, Nevada and Missouri.
 The rest of the time, we lived in The Magic Bus, our Volkswagen Eurovan.  At one point, we had slept in it for 110 nights straight.
 After one night in the comfort of home, I already miss it.  Just seven months until we'll be on the road again.