Winging It To Buffalo

1,600 miles, one very good dog, and the adventure that started it all.

Wide-open midwest skies.

Fair warning, reader: The Sol Wanderer is going to be a little all over the place. Not because I don’t have a plan — I have many plans, most of them scrawled on sticky notes in various states of urgency — but because that’s genuinely just who I am. I’m a woman who drove 1,600 miles alone to pick up a camper she’d never seen in person, and considered this a perfectly reasonable sequence of events. So if you’re here for a tidy content calendar where every post fits neatly into a category and arrives on a predictable schedule, I love that for you. This is probably not your place.

What you will find here is camper life and open roads and dogs and gear and all the practical things I’ve learned along the way. But also some harder stuff, because this space exists for a few reasons and not all of them are pretty. There’s real joy here, the kind that a little Sol Dawn parked at the edge of nowhere with coffee brewing and dogs at your feet can bring in a way that’s hard to explain until you’ve felt it. And there’s grief too, and some unfinished business that doesn’t wait politely for you to be ready. TSW is where I’m working through both, honestly and out loud, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you’re carrying something too, you’re welcome here. And if you’re not, and you just want the camping content, you’re welcome here too.

We’re going to get there. Just maybe not in a straight line.

Buying the camper was a decision. Driving across the country alone to pick it up was something else entirely. I left Wyoming buzzing with the kind of excitement that makes it hard to sit still, the adventure finally real and happening and mine. I had been planning this for months, and now here I was actually doing it, open road, the whole thing. For the first thousand miles or so, that feeling held. The Midwest is good for that. Long flat stretches of highway where you can just drive and think and feel like anything is possible.

I had originally planned to bring all three dogs on this trip, but my veterinarian gently and correctly talked me out of it. Long haul, unknown camper, too many variables. Better to make it a mom and Bruno adventure, she said. I’m so glad I listened.

Bruno was, without question, the best road trip companion I’ve ever had. Every rest area was a full and serious investigation: nose down, tail up, reading the p-mail left by every dog who’d passed through before him. New location, new messages, very important business. He approached each stop like it held information critical to national security, and honestly, who was I to say it didn’t.

Co-pilot. Mostly decorative.

We spent the first night in Lincoln, Nebraska, where my niece goes to school, and the moment she walked in Bruno lost his mind completely, greeting her with the full-body enthusiasm he reserved for people he considered genuinely worthy of his time, which is a short and carefully curated list. It was exactly the kind of stop I didn’t know I needed. I’ve made the drive back east more times than I can count over the years, and for a long time I was the kind of person who would just power through it, sixteen hours straight, no problem. Somewhere along the way I quietly stopped being that person, and Lincoln was the perfect reminder that breaking a trip into something human-sized is not a defeat. It’s just wisdom.

My niece and I have traveled a lot together over the years, all over the world actually, but this was the first time I’d come to her, to her city, her neighborhood, her life. There’s something different about that. She brought takeout birria to the hotel and we sat across from each other and just talked, the easy kind of conversation that only happens with people who have known you long enough to skip the surface stuff. I left the next morning feeling lighter than I had in a while.

Checking the local news. Very important stop.

The next morning we said our goodbyes to Lincoln and headed east, and it rained every mile after Lincoln. Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio — the sky just opened up and stayed that way for the rest of the trip. I kept the wipers going and Bruno kept watch from the back seat, occasionally lifting his head to assess the situation and then settling back down, unbothered and trusting, completely unhelpful as a co-pilot but genuinely excellent company.

Day two. We chased the rain. He approved of the grass.

We stopped for the night in Sandusky, Ohio. A quick, practical stop, just enough rest to keep going, and then pushed on the next morning to Tonawanda, just outside Buffalo, near the dealership. We checked into the hotel, hauled our bags up, and Bruno encountered something he had never once prepared for: an elevator. He stepped in cautiously, felt the floor shift beneath him, and looked up at me with an expression that said ‘I have questions.’ Then he sat down like he’d been doing this his whole life. Unbothered. Committed. Content just to be with me.

That was Bruno. A little uncertain, then all in. I think about that a lot now.

By the time we hit Erie, Pennsylvania, the excitement had gone quiet. I was driving to New York, and New York was not a neutral place for me. It would be my first time back since my mother’s celebration of life in 2021, and all the unresolved things I’d been keeping at a comfortable distance for a thousand miles were suddenly right there, taking up all the space. My stepfather, Charley, was still at his farm in Owego, and I was headed there after the pickup, and there was grief tangled up in that, too, in ways I hadn’t fully let myself look at yet. When I crossed the New York state line, I cried. Bruno didn’t ask why. He just put his head closer to the front seat, the way he did when he knew something mattered, and we drove on. Grief hits you head-on sometimes, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

The day before we picked up the Dawn, we went to Niagara Falls, which I had somehow never seen despite growing up on the East Coast and having spent time in the area. I’m not sure how that happens, honestly. Some things are just always within reach, and you never quite get to them, and then one day life arranges itself in such a way that you finally get there. For me, it took driving 1,600 miles across the country to pick up a camper.

It was pouring rain. The kind that soaks through everything within the first five minutes and makes you quietly question every decision that led you to this moment. I was glad I’d packed Bruno’s rain jacket, and Bruno was significantly less glad about the rain jacket, but he wore it with the particular dignity of a dog who has decided to tolerate something because he loves you.

Niagara Falls. He had questions about all of this.

He leaned into me more than usual out there, blinking against the mist and trying to decide whether this was an adventure or a mistake, and honestly, same. The rain blurred the edges of everything. But the falls thundered anyway, completely indifferent to the weather and the timing, doing exactly what they were made to do regardless of whether conditions were ideal. There was something in that I needed to hear.

I stood there soaked, laughing at the absurdity of it all, and felt something settle inside me that I hadn’t expected. Not certainty. Not clarity. Just movement.

On the way back to the hotel that night, I made a quick stop at Wegmans on the way in. If you’re from the northeast, you already know. If you’re not, I’ll just say this: Wegmans is a grocery store the way that Niagara Falls is a puddle, and I was not going to be this close to one without stopping. The only problem was Bruno was in the car, and I was so afraid to leave him that I rushed through the whole thing in a complete panic. I still somehow managed to spend a small fortune. I grabbed sushi, cracked open a Labatt Blue back at the hotel, spread everything out on the bed, and decided this counted as a celebration.

He found the bed immediately. No hesitation.

Bruno sprawled across most of the bed and watched me eat with the quiet, focused intensity he reserved for things he wanted but knew he wasn’t going to get. Tomorrow I’d drive to the dealership and pick up the Sol Dawn. Tomorrow, everything would be different. But that night it was just the two of us, a good meal, a cold beer, and a warm room in Buffalo.

Wegmans sushi and a Labatt Blue. Pre-camper eve celebration.

I didn’t sleep much. I’m pretty sure it was equal parts excitement about the camper and the weight of everything waiting on the other side of picking her up. But no matter the cause of my insomnia, this moment in time was its own kind of perfect.

Keep Moving,

Rachel

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