The Pyrlik Family RV Trips: Yeah! It worked!

I guess many of you have missed my thoughts to the second part of our trip J.

Here they are:

I did not post on purpose for the last 4 weeks because I wanted to be sure of what I am going to say. Many of you figured that the first part of our trip did not end too well.

Living on such a small space for 24/7 did prove to be a greater challenge than anticipated. Since all three of us have very strong but also very different personalities, we clashed….unfortunately a lot; by the end of November a bit too much L. When we arrived at our rental house on Hilton Head all three of us took a different room to sleep in and for days we hardly ever spoke to each other.

BUT: obviously at least Manfred and I are adults (Ben was fine anyway after some time to himself) and we started speaking again and both of us decided to take the time to contemplate and to review (in our minds) what went wrong and what was good. So we had several weeks of self-reflection and some good conversations about us and how we saw each other (the good and bad) and how we think we can deal with the other rather better than worse. Those 4 months on the road did teach us a lot about the other…but only after some weeks of reflection things became clearer and easier to understand (at least for me it took several weeks). After 20 years with Manfred I finally figured him half way out and understand him way better than ever before. For sure I knew about his “tricky sides” and the things I did not really appreciated or understood…but now I finally understand the “WHY”! It is so much easier to overlook and/or forgive things that I do not appreciate if I understand the WHY behind it! The same is true for myself: I see the “bad”, irritating and infuriating sides of me way earlier coming, I (and Manfred) understand the “why” better and I am sometimes better in stopping them. And I only understand all this because the 4 months on the road forced me to face it, fight it, reflect on it and finally understand it! YEAH! So there was a HUGE positive outcome!

And yes, the time we needed for self-reflection was well spend! We did not fight once in the last 4 weeks (Oh yes, we argued. But we will always argueJ this is who we are!). The last weeks were wonderful! Loving, caring, fun filled and eventually very, very hard to give up! I am sure we will continue the good pace and we all will be kind of sad when the time is up in mid April 2013. Thank God a new home/house and loving, caring friends are waiting for us in Hilton Head! We do miss them all! Otherwise it would not be so easy to give up the feeling of total freedom while traveling this tremendously beautiful country. I guess this was not our last trip!

I hope to attach some pics but the internet is deplorable and the upload time awful!

Beate, there is one especially for you :-)