I kept quiet about our immediate plans after Houston because the big plan was making a 🎊surprise visit 🎉 and we pulled it off!  We had to have every element of the whole week go exactly as planned—the trailer repair and truck tires and hotel stay with Banjo and plumbing appointment for me—and then we hitched up in the repair parking lot (go me succeeding at that post-anesthesia) and headed west just a bit (while burnishing the trailer brakes) to Austin to surprise our Airstreaming friends, Leon and Rachael.
The surprise was simply because I chat with Leon frequently on our D&D Discord server, and when I mentioned we’d try to get there, he said, “Let’s make it a surprise for Rachael.” Seeing as how he’s the dungeon master, Tracy and I made it so. Yes, you heard that right: D&D, as in Dungeons and Dragons, as in a couple of elves, a ranger, a wizard (guess who), and a gnome roaming the wilds of the Sword Coast to free an enslaved realm from a domineering and lustful vampire, Strahd Von Zorrovitch. That’s a post for another day!
This post is supposed to be about the joys of visiting Leon and Rachael, but, as I was packing up the inside of the trailer this morning for our travel day, what was on my mind were the gorgeous colors of the inside of their trailer.  Really?  We spend two nights and a day with friends in a rare and wonderful encounter, and I come away with trailer envy.Â
This is why. The weather drove us inside each other’s trailers to visit, so although we played games and shared food and talked about our lives pre-nomad-life, mostly we just compared our Airstreams. “Your hallway is a little wider, isn’t it?” “How do you keep that curtain rod up in your shower?” “Look how clever your corner laundry basket is!”Â
OMG on and on and on we went, admiring each other’s kitchen sinks. This morning, as Tracy and I were hitching up to leave, we all four stepped aside to compare hitches, and then solar panels, and finally I declared that we could talk like this ad infinitum so we had to pull away, like ripping off a bandaid.
My conclusions: Our interior layout is still the best of all Airstreams! Seriously, there’s a 28-ft group on Facebook where we 28-ers do nothing but tell each other how awesome we are to have chosen this model. Rachael and Leon’s is almost exactly the same size (27 feet technically), but what they have that we don’t is an shiny, sleek, ice-blue aesthetic that’s straight out of a futuristic science fiction dream.Â
This all makes for several good jokes in lieu of me trying to describe how very, very much we enjoyed seeing each other. How rare it is to spend time with friends on the road, even rarer to have this lifestyle in common. How utterly joyful to feel comfortable sitting in each other’s small spaces laughing so loud that when one person steps outside to grab something from the other trailer, we could hear the laughter through two walls of aluminum.Â
See you down the road, Rachael and Leon. And Rachael, SURPRISE!
