Seeking A Good Old Summer Time

Not to whine or anything, but I don't have much by way of memories of the "good old summer time." We didn't have summer on the island where I grew up, just wet season and dry season. That brought a variety of excitement from floods to water rationing; but never summer. No, never summer.

There was that one time when we came "back" to the United States for furlough (how does a kid go back to a place they never came from to begin with?). From looking at the pictures in the photo albums I conclude that it was summer. Seems like the four of us plus Grandma and her housekeeper Emmy all crammed into a big brown-gold car of some forgettable American brand, a car we bought in Florida and sold when we got to California. I vaguely remember sitting in that car hour upon hour, day after day. It was hot, and I remember no air conditioning in the vehicle. We paused only to tour national parks and to visit with our parents' friends, relatives or acquaintances who could have been Argentinians, for all we knew of them or their unfamiliar context. 

Yep, it was a summer furlough. But for me there was never that Chris-Rice-clumsy-fly kind of summer where you spend long days wading in the creek, lying in the hammock reading a book, camping in the mountains with your parents, or flying kites on a Pacific Ocean beach. None of that stuff of getting to know your cousins as well as if they were your own siblings and having it last year after year, no little summer romances with the boy down the street, no summer sandwiches topped by fresh, flavorful hot tomatoes straight off the vines, no Fourth of July parades or trips to the county fair.

Heaven is not the only destination for which you can have nostalgia, having never experienced it.

This is where I confess to my faithful readers that I have a secret Sunset-fed dream/dilemma, one that I keep working on but have not yet solved: to experience a "good old summer time" in my own lifetime. 

In my ideal scenario my husband and I rent out our house to summer grad students. We buy a gently-used Airstream trailer and a truck (with who-knows-what money), and head out across the continent for the summer. A long summer. We'll have none of that little 2-month gasp for air that the K-12 teachers must call "summer" while they are planning for the coming year and attending professional development. This is a summer like we haven't had in thirty-ahem years. A real summertime summer.

So we hook up our sweet Airstream to the truck and take off with no plan. Just point our noses in a direction and go. Our trailer's loaded with some basics and our electronics (phone, laptop, iPad). Every day we eat healthfully of produce picked up during a recent stop at a farmers' market, go for a hike of at least 5 miles, take time to write, get acquainted with at least one new person, read out loud to each other from a good book, and learn about the local color of wherever-we-are. And every so often we park where we can wake up to one of those heart-stopping views, somewhere in the grandeurs of north America. Oh, that would be joy! 

Can you please tell me how I can get ahold of a good old summertime? For reals?