We do this every time we can. Each three-day weekend for sure, whenever I get to come up for air. We take off from Houston, fold down the seats, load up the trunk, and take off from Toon Town for an Adventure. This escapist routine, the random, last-minute, days-in-advance scheduling carrying us away from our lives, our cares, our half-baked future plans for something simple to attain: a momentary freedom. We snatch up our toiletries and sunscreen and sleeping bags, and we chase the stars.

On the road he listens with one ear to my chatter and cheers or my soft, sleepy breathing. The girl who isn’t working or aching or bumming for a breakthrough, despairing in the face of her dreams. The girl who is browsing the guide book and reading off attractions. We drive for hours before we pick a place and pitch a tent, wherever we can find a nice plot of land outside a city with a grill and a flat space seated near a public toilet and surrounded by green—green like the money we’re saving, like the life that drinks sunlight instead of a flood of fluorescents, like our thoughts and experiences that we imagine are all aging much too fast. We dwell in the quiet, in the other, in something so far from our fears that it’s a comfort in itself, like your friend who stays still in the face of your grief to nurse your emotion, like an empty vase to hurl out your insides in, like a second skin to pour your confused youth into.

As we camp, we catch our breath. We take our time. We vacation. It’s a pause, a stall, a moment to wait before the city we know swallows us again. It’s a chance to explore: Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Corpus Christi, anywhere within reach. San Francisco. Just anywhere. Places we’ve never been as adults. Places with new demographics and tactics. They’re the much-needed landings punctuating our living staircase. We go to taste summer vacation again.

Gas, miles, time, sleep: these are the currencies that purchase our breakaway, our relief. These are the monies that buy our freedom, that find Adventure, that release us unto the world without and remind us that we are not locked in, that we can expand beyond the city limits and race away for a little while and refocus and re-learn and remember what brought us close to each other and what helped us learn more about the way we think and feel and imagine.

I grew up an hour outside of Houston Proper. I grew up with a wanderlust to roam and meander, to experience, to stop and stare, to weasel my way into a life that might have been mine or might be mine still. I have never felt rooted, have always had wings, and the two of us, we travel when we get time; we go to remember the two college juniors we once were who flung themselves out into the world across the seas and wondered about who they could be. We are not those people now, but we will be those people again, before our youth is expired. We travel to remember our dreams, our goals, our destinations, our pasts and futures, who we are and who we are not; we travel to understand the world and what we want from it a little better. And it is never wasted time.

Last Sunday, the sun rose on our little tent over a lake surrounded by private campsites, one of which we’d managed to wiggle our way into the day before. This was all after coming in too late on the Friday night to make our reservation and spending six hours wedged in our car seats, crinkled against the car doors, with our camping gear, our snacks and books and costumes. On Sunday, we pulled ourselves upright and dressed for a faire, me in a corset, him in a felt hat and boots, looped with the cowhorn I had bought for him. We were chasing Renaissance festivals around the state of Texas. This was number three; the last of the season until the great Texas Renaissance Festival (TRF) picked up again in the fall. It was a full day of walking, exhausting, exhaustive, fantastic fun, traipsing from show to show, posing for pictures, browsing shops for trinkets and treasures, our usual, nerdy, fantastical getaway. I was the blue devil, smeared with makeup and topped with red horns in my certainly-not-appropriate-for-work faire uniform. We were half-dragging ourselves through the gate, through the parking lot, to the car at closing.

That night I was very sick—dehydration and fatigue from the faire all day. My headache made it hard to keep my eyes open, let alone stand, but then the lightning storm happened, started just after we got back to the campsite. Across the lake, over one of the sister campsites, a cumulonimbus crouched, a blank screen, a light spot in a blue-grey sky, like a second sea. And white light began to dance behind the screen, bright flashes, occasionally organized into thin ribbons electrifying the bottom from the top. This went on for an hour or more.

I rushed to break out the camera, throbbing headache and all, and flipped it to video and stood still for three whole minutes, watching through the screen, holding a finger to my lips so my man didn’t speak and ruin the moment, ruin the video. Then I switched to still; I took about twenty pictures of it, trying to catch it just right, trying different settings, until my fatigue tricked back, enough to tame me into watching in solemn silence. “It’s like a symphony for the eyes,” my man whispered. “Lovely show God’s got on display for us tonight, my dear.”

And, knowing about his religious skepticism, knowing about my avid spirituality, knowing, most of all, about my passion-fueled furrows for the sake of writing fiction, I smiled appreciatively at him. “That’s such a nice thing to say.”

We travel to watch the world around us. We travel to explore our own spirits, minds, bodies, and potentials. And we do it whenever we can.