If you're just now joining us from the link in your Christmas card, welcome! I'm posting a month a day til Christmas. Sort of like a "twelve drummers drumming" situation, only it's more like "...two bathroom remodels, and a family in quar-an-tiiiiiine." Hang in there. We'll make it to December.
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Hey, y'all -
FLASHBACK: In the middle of 2017, your dad bought one of those old truck bed campers from the early 1970s off Craigslist for $300.
I was as encouraging as I could be on the outside, but on the inside, I felt like Jack's mom when her boy came home and said he'd traded the cow for magic beans. At the time, I thought we had no business buying a camper because we had enough projects on our list, chief among them turning the kitchen in the house we'd just bought from this:
(^ That's our realtor, wondering how the hell we're going to secure financing for a house with no kitchen)
To this:
And your dad had already embarked upon another wild project that year: The Viking Boat.
When he was in Afghanistan, your dad started spending his down time researching Scandinavian boat building, as one does. I didn't know how serious it was until he called me in Missoula and said "There's going to be a delivery coming to the house tomorrow." The next day, a semi trailer pulled up in front of our house and a guy started unloading hundreds of pounds of marine-grade plywood in our driveway. Reminder to self: Never underestimate the nerdery of your husband when left to his own devices. He actually built a sailboat by hand and we christened her "Elskerinne," which is Norwegian for "The other woman."
So, all that to say that I felt like your dad's itch to build something weird and exhausting was probably scratched.
Ha ha ha! Nope!
In early June, he found some time on his hands, and decided to attack the camper that I had put out of my mind entirely because it had been moved up to our property at the lake where I had encouraged it to "Go, be free!"
But if we were going to do it, I suggested that we really embrace the 1970s tackiness of it all, because some of the lime green and electric blue in there was going to need to stay and it's better if it looks like a design choice instead of the the unfortunate byproduct of a decade of disco.
Sure, the world may be in the grip of a pandemic, but we're stuck at home anyway, so let's make a tiki hut on wheels! (Stay with me.)
Thor started by ripping off all of the (old, leaking) corrugated metal exterior, and building a new outer shell from that same high-quality plywood he'd used for the boat. A ton of epoxy later, that thing was water tight.
Meanwhile, I got to attack the interior, which looked like this:
It was the hardest thing I'd ever painted because there are so many small walls and angles and every time you'd think you were done, you were wrong. I had to do a lot of it lying down, and I remember asking your dad if this is what Michelangelo felt like when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. I think sometimes, he pretends he can't hear me.
It became our summer weekend project, and about five weekends later, it looked like this:
We've been on some great family adventures already, and the camper is currently my favorite inanimate object, outdoor division.
Your dad and I get along so well, I think, because we both have the same habit of listening to a completely outlandish idea and then saying "That's preposterous! Probably shouldn't be done! But if we were going to do it, here's how it could happen..."
And the next thing you know, there's a tiki hut in my yard. Story of my Burbach life.
Love,
Mom
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