Leveling Up
Chapter 173: Night Watch
By now, the Friday drive north had become pure muscle memory.
After picking Nelson up from the office, we pointed Don Don Van towards our beloved Roaring River. The weather couldn't have been more inviting. Blue skies, bright sunshine, and one of those gloriously warm afternoons that make you wonder why anyone would ever live anywhere else.
It all felt wonderfully familiar.
Until the camp host started handing out notices.
She wandered from campsite to campsite, giving everyone a single sheet of paper. Ours informed us that the park was under a flood watch. Heavy rain was expected overnight on Saturday, and everyone needed to be prepared to pack up quickly and evacuate if the river started rising.
Well. That escalated quickly. It sounded serious... although I have to admit there was also a tiny part of me that found the whole thing strangely exciting. We had never been evacuated for a flood before. It felt like one of those authentic outdoor experiences nobody actually asks for.
Saturday, however, was almost suspiciously normal. The forecast promised chaos. Reality delivered sunshine and humidity. We had mini bagels for breakfast, Taiwanese cold noodles for an early dinner, and spent most of the day happily doing very little while waiting for nature to make up its mind.
Our biggest concern wasn't actually the storm.
It was ourselves.
Both Nelson and I are champion sleepers. We've slept through thunderstorms before. We've slept through campground noise, alarms and goodness knows what else. I was genuinely worried that if the camp host knocked on our door at two in the morning yelling, "The river's rising!" we'd simply roll over and continue snoring.
So after dinner we developed what felt like a military operation. We would sleep in shifts. One person would be on Night Watch while the other slept. I volunteered for the first shift starting at 11pm. In theory, this was an excellent plan. In practice, I was far too wired to sleep beforehand. I crawled into bed at 9pm hoping to grab a couple of hours but my brain was already imagining flash floods, floating picnic tables and dramatic midnight rescues.
Before my shift officially began, we packed everything inside the van, switched on both porch lights, unlocked the surge protector so we could unplug in seconds if necessary, and generally prepared for what felt like an expedition to Antarctica rather than a Missouri campground.
At 11pm I climbed into the passenger seat and officially assumed my role as Chief Weather Observer. Besides monitoring the rain, I also found myself watching our neighbors. A couple of pickup trucks quietly drove out of the campground, leaving their RV trailers behind. That fascinated me. I couldn't imagine abandoning what was essentially your house while you drove away. Surely if I owned a trailer I'd be taking it with me? But apparently these people knew something I didn't, because they certainly didn't look like they were heading out for midnight tacos.
The campground itself remained eerily calm.
Everyone seemed to be waiting.
Just before midnight the rain finally arrived. Not dramatically. Just... rain. I provided Nelson with live weather commentary from my command post. "It's raining now." "A little harder." "Still just rain." Poor Nelson was supposed to be sleeping but, unsurprisingly, he wasn't doing much better than I was. Then, just as I started thinking perhaps we'd all overreacted...
The siren went off. It wasn't just loud. It sounded exactly like a tornado siren.
Within seconds we were both wearing rain jackets, unplugging shore power and preparing to leave. The park superintendent drove through the campground in his pickup, telling everyone to evacuate to either the Nature Center or the Emory Melton Inn and shelter indoors.
Hang on.
Tornado?
I'd spent the entire day worrying about flooding. Tornado hadn't even made my list.
We drove to the Nature Center, where only one other car sat in the parking lot. Unsure whether we were even supposed to go inside, we spotted someone opening the door. We both bolted across the car park. Well... Nelson bolted. I shuffled along in flip-flops like someone escaping a tornado while simultaneously trying not to lose her footwear.
Inside we were greeted by Ranger Amanda and her beautiful service dog, Smoke. Amanda confirmed what we suspected. It had been a tornado siren. A tornado had touched down nearby. Well... that certainly wasn't in the flood preparedness pamphlet.
She pointed us towards a local meteorologist's livestream before heading back outside to help other campers. During the daytime the Nature Center always felt warm and welcoming, especially now that we'd become friends with David the naturalist. At one o'clock in the morning though? It felt strangely eerie.
Obviously, while waiting for updates, Nelson and I took tourist selfies. I mean... what else do you do while sheltering from a tornado?
About twenty minutes later Mike, the park superintendent, arrived with good news. The tornado warning had expired. The danger now was the heavy rain, so he suggested everyone relocate to the hotel car park on higher ground and avoid parking beneath trees, many of whose roots had become unstable after weeks of wet weather.
When we arrived at the hotel, everything suddenly made sense. The car park was almost full. Mostly pickup trucks. So this was where all our mysterious neighbors had disappeared to. We found a reasonably level parking space near the end, hung our soaking raincoats inside the bathroom to dry, crawled into bed at almost two in the morning...
...and promptly slept like babies.
Chapter 174: Three Badges
Despite surviving our first tornado evacuation, we somehow managed to sleep until nine o'clock the next morning. When I unzipped the back curtain, I stared out in complete confusion. The hotel car park was empty. We were the only vehicle left.
How two people managed to sleep through almost a hundred pickup trucks starting up and driving away remains one of the great mysteries of modern science.
We returned to the campground expecting chaos. Instead... Everything looked exactly the same. The campsites were occupied. Our neighbors were still there, all of them. The sun was shining. It felt as though the entire evacuation had been some strange collective dream. To celebrate surviving our first tornado warning, we made ourselves bacon and eggs.
Well. We had now experienced all three. I felt like we'd earned three merit badges.
Congratulations. Level Up: Experienced Vanlifers.
Back in Bella Vista, I was looking forward to a wonderfully uneventful week.
Having learned my lesson from bogging the van only the previous weekend, I'd specifically upgraded our campground booking to a concrete site. Or so I thought. When we checked in, the registration sheet still assigned us to a grassy campsite. I checked my reservation. Somehow the campground manager had upgraded our booking...starting two weeks later.
The office was already closed. There was absolutely no chance I was voluntarily driving onto wet grass again. So we quietly picked an empty concrete site and hoped nobody would arrive later claiming we'd stolen it.
After two consecutive weekends of unexpected adventures, I desperately wanted life to become boring again.
Chapter 175: Boring Isn't Always Peaceful
Be careful what you wish for.
The next few days were wonderfully boring. Almost. The routine returned: Morning errands. Gym workouts. Dinner at the park. Hot weather followed by rain. Repeat.
It was exactly the sort of ordinary week I'd been craving. Except... The house.
I genuinely think discussing HVAC systems deserves its own category of psychological torture. Brody and I seemed to have endless conversations about how best to cool one small bedroom without cooling the entire house overnight. First came the suggestion of a bedroom mini-split. Then a two-zone ducted system. That sounded promising until the HVAC contractor explained that because one zone would be tiny and the other enormous, sleeping in the bedroom would apparently feel like lying beside a jet engine. Next came the smart zoning system. Fantastic. Only another thirteen thousand dollars.
Absolutely not.
Finally someone suggested abandoning ducted air-conditioning altogether and installing two separate mini-splits.
I nearly had heart failure. There was no way I wanted bulky white indoor units hanging halfway up our beautiful walls like giant plastic backpacks. House building, I was learning, involved making impossibly expensive decisions about things nobody ever notices once they're finished.
Thankfully, other decisions felt much more satisfying. We locked in our magical Toto bidet toilet. Finalized cabinet colors. Started talking wallpaper. I wasn't actually building the house, but somehow it still felt like a full-time job.
As though that wasn't enough excitement, my eye exam became another unexpected saga. Despite booking weeks in advance, the clinic repeatedly insisted they couldn't verify my insurance. The insurance company repeatedly assured me I was definitely covered. The clinic remained unconvinced. Cue yet more phone calls, more text messages, more people confidently telling me completely opposite things.
This wasn't the peaceful boredom I'd been hoping for.
Friday finally arrived, bringing with it our usual pilgrimage to the construction site before heading north. This week I caught the framers installing our enormous windows. On paper, an eight-by-five-foot window doesn't sound particularly dramatic. Watching two men lift one into place using what looked like oversized suction cups while standing high above the ground was considerably more nerve-racking.
Outside sat one of the workers' wife beneath a little umbrella with their baby daughter. She proudly told me the little girl was one year old...and had four teeth. I don't know why that detail delighted me so much, but it did.
Chris also pointed out another mysterious layer covering the roof framing."It's weather protection," he explained. House construction continued to amaze me. There always seemed to be temporary versions of permanent things. Temporary walls. Temporary roof. Temporary weatherproofing. Eventually, one day, all the real bits would arrive.
Back at Roaring River, Nelson immediately celebrated Friday evening with a nap while I built our little outdoor living room. Two camp chairs. One tiny coffee table. One moonshade.
It wasn't exactly luxury...although sitting outside together with ice cream after dinner certainly felt like it.
The next morning the moonshade was still standing... thanks to Nelson's latest engineering masterpiece involving our levelling blocks securing the poles, and we enjoyed cold noodle brunches, fresh trout marinated in miso, mirin and sake, and another peaceful evening beneath a perfectly clear sky.
The forecast claimed there was only a remote chance of rain. After a lengthy debate, we dismantled the moonshade anyway, in complete darkness. I have to admit... We'd become remarkably skilled at packing away an outdoor lounge room by a tiny headlight.
On Father's Day morning, the bears and I presented Nelson with his card before enjoying crepes and bacon.
On our way back to Bella Vista, we made one final stop at our future home. For once, we were both there together. The house now had walls. It had windows. It had doors. Standing inside, we walked from room to room imagining furniture, measuring spaces and pretending we already lived there.
I looked around and smiled. "Our house is squattable now." If we absolutely had to, we could roll out our sleeping bags and spend the night inside.
It wasn't finished.
Not even close.
But for the first time, it truly felt like a home.
And somehow...
It suddenly didn't feel very far away anymore.
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