Déjà Vu with a Twist of Wist

We’re in Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware, visiting our friends Bob and Ben, who have been delightful hosts in every way. I’ll write about this visit, next.

Before I do that, though, I have to get this out of the way: the photos I found and the feelings they evoke from the first time we stayed in this same state park campground.

It was June 2019, my photo archive tells me, which I think is when Tracy and I took the Frolic on its one real tour, south to the Replacements warehouse in North Carolina (so I could sell my family’s China and silver and crystal), plus a stop to see the band Phish in Hampton. It was fun.

What a different set of memories that trip brings to mind. Camping was so much simpler. Really, we could not break the Frolic so that it worked worse than it did, so no worries there. It was just a small, wooden box we towed behind us and slept in, not the sum total of everything we owned.

All the camping doodads we carried with us were bright and new, thrown together with ignorant enthusiasm.

We biked to a brewery. I was wearing a bathing suit under a cover-up. I believe we accidentally left an outdoor rug at the campground, and we didn’t even notice until days after we got home. How could we have been so flippant?

The keyword to this mystery: vacation.

It’s wild how I think wistfully of the trip we took in the Frolic, when here I am back in the same place in my 100x more expensive Airstream, my home. The Frolic was a piece of junk (no offense to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law whom we sold it to), but it was our toy, and I miss the carefree times we had in it. Isn’t that strange?

13 thoughts to “Déjà Vu with a Twist of Wist”

  1. I don’t think it’s strange at all! A vacation is a vacation, it’s away from your regular life, it’s carefree and fun and you’re doing new and different things. With the airstream you might look on the surface like you’re on holiday but you aren’t. It’s your home and your life, with all the responsibilities and stresses that are involved with that. You might be parked in the same campground but you aren’t on holiday this time. I’m not sure what a vacation would be for you now, what do you think?

    1. That’s a good question. My “am I on vacation” lifestyle is so upside down that sometimes when I see friends’ trip photos I think, “I haven’t been anywhere in so long!”

      1. It would be a vacation if you came down here 😉

        Also, I’d forgotten what great fabrics you had and great soft furnishings in there. It was SO PRETTY!

        1. Visiting you is top of my list, believe me! And I think the Frolic is very photogenic; in person it might seem very very small and run down. Great pics though!

  2. It’s not strange at all. It was carefree and only there to be enjoyed… no stress, no worrying, no major responsibilities. And it does look fun!
    😊

    1. The Frolic was indeed fun! Once we got it on the road and weren’t worrying about it breaking down. 🤪

    1. We had the Frolic for a brief time when we lived in Tracy’s house. It was a pain in the butt in that it needed a ton of work just to get on the road that we didn’t anticipate when we bought it. But, Tracy learned all about wiring, plumbing, piping for propane, weather-proofing, you name it. So a true starter trailer. I loved it! 😂

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