This weekend was supposed to be something entirely different.

We had been kicking around the idea of taking Stormeigh toward Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula. Ride the ferry. Poke around some history. Find a few geocaches. Do the normal SETXMisFits thing where we turn a relatively inexpensive outing into something the kids will hopefully remember years later.

Then, almost at the last minute, we changed direction.

Sabine ATV Park. Burkeville, Texas.

Stormeigh had never been mudding before.

Well.

That seemed like a problem we could fix.

So instead of pointing south toward the Gulf, we loaded the Jeep, hitched up the homemade Vardo, put the CFMOTO and our little utility trailer into the traveling circus, and headed north.

It was not an especially elegant departure.

SETXMisFits expeditions rarely are. If NASA launched missions the way we do, Mission Control would begin every countdown with, “Okay... anybody seen the ramps?”

We were already running later than we probably should have been when we pulled into a dollar store in Burkeville and discovered our first problem.

The little utility trailer had a flat tire.

How long had it been flat?

No damn clue.

That trailer rides behind the Vardo, which rides behind the Jeep. From the driver's seat, the little trailer is basically invisible. Apparently the Jeep and Vardo also did a good enough job masking it that we had not felt anything obvious enough to stop us.

That was problem number one.

Then we discovered a loading ramp was missing.

Oh. Shit.

We had just bought the pair off Facebook Marketplace for around $100 about a week earlier. They were practically new to us. The only real use they had seen so far was during one of our cemetery adventures.

We went back for the ramp.

Thankfully, we found it.

Then came the slightly more horrifying realization:

There were supposed to be TWO ramps.

The other one was gone too.

Jackie figures we backtracked somewhere around seven or eight miles, staring at the shoulders and ditches and hoping like hell that nobody had already found themselves a free aluminum loading ramp.

And somehow, somehow, there it was.

Sitting off the side of the road.

We recovered both of them.

The weekend had nearly donated $100 worth of ramps to Newton County before we ever got muddy. Apparently our equipment had decided to start the adventure without us.

The lesson was absorbed.

On the trip home, those sons of bitches were strapped down considerably better.

There is another part of this trip that matters to the story.

It is something Jackie and I have been doing for most of our life together, and the kids caught onto it early.

We have a habit of punching above our financial class.

Not pretending to have money we do not have.

Not drowning ourselves in payments so we can look wealthy.

And certainly not waiting until some imaginary point in the future when our income, credit score, vehicle and equipment finally grant us permission to participate.

We just figure out what the experience actually requires.

Then we build our own key.

Sometimes that impresses people enough that they welcome us in with open arms.

Sometimes they look at what they spent to accomplish the same thing and start asking uncomfortable questions about their own life choices.

Usually it is a little bit of both.

We explained some of that to Stormeigh during this trip.

There were people at Sabine with rigs worth amounts of money that would make our entire setup look almost comical.

Big side-by-sides. Expensive trucks. Toy haulers. Purpose-built equipment.

And there we were with our CFMOTO four-wheeler, a homemade camper, a beat-up little utility trailer and whatever pieces we had managed to assemble ourselves.

Yet somehow we were still in the same woods.

Still riding the same trails. Still getting dirty. Still having the same adventure.

That is the part we have spent years teaching our kids:

Price is not always the admission ticket.

Sometimes you can learn how the system works, ignore the financial path everybody says you are supposed to take, and sideload your own damn APK.

We have been doing some version of that for years.

Back in the Jeep-crowd days, friends had four-door Jeeps with lifts, accessories, names down the sides and enough modifications to fill a catalog.

A lot of them also treated those Jeeps like they were terrified the vehicles might discover dirt.

We revived a 1995 Geo Tracker from the dead.

Then, because we are us, we had a friend put “Mini Jeep” down the side of it and started hanging out with the Jeep crowd anyway.

We took that little Tracker places some of the much more expensive Jeeps would never go.

Not because their vehicles could not do it.

Because their owners did not want to scratch them.

Sabine felt like the modern continuation of the same joke.

We have never been particularly interested in buying the social permission slip.

We would rather make something happen with what we have.

The utility trailer may have tried to arrive at Sabine with one flat tire and no loading ramps, but once it reached the park, the ugly little thing found its purpose.

Passenger shuttle.

Now, nobody was pretending it had suddenly become a purpose-built people mover. We kept its use to the easier park roads and treated it like exactly what it was: a slow, simple way of moving everybody together without requiring a second expensive machine.

And the girls loved it.

Of course they did.

Kids generally do not care what something cost.

They care whether it is fun.

The trailer ended up becoming part of the personality of the entire weekend.

There is something wonderfully absurd about passing expensive off-road machines while pulling a weathered little flatbed with two perfectly content kids sitting on it.

But that is kind of the point.

We were not trying to win the parking-lot equipment competition.

We were trying to have a weekend.

The whole reason this particular change of plans made sense was that Stormeigh had never actually been mudding.

There are some experiences that are difficult to explain properly beforehand.

Mud riding is one of them.

You can tell somebody that they are going to get filthy.

You can explain that the machine will get filthy.

You can explain that there will eventually be mud in places where physics suggests mud should not be able to reach.

None of that fully communicates the experience until the first splash hits.

Then it clicks.

The CFMOTO came back wearing exactly the amount of Sabine it should have been wearing.

So did everybody else.

One of the best parts was watching the kids figure out that none of this required some massive financial production.

They were not comparing our setup to everybody else's.

They were riding. Laughing. Getting dirty. Taking turns. Finding ways to turn whatever was around them into something fun.

That is exactly what we wanted.

The Vardo had one more test to pass.

We had put a new A/C unit in it the night before the trip.

After previous camping adventures where climate control had become less of a convenience and more of a character-building exercise, this particular test mattered.

Sabine in July is not exactly an environment where you want to discover that your air conditioner has philosophical objections to refrigeration.

We fired it up.

It worked.

Actually, “worked” undersells it.

That little camper got so damn cold that, as far as we were concerned, you could hang meat inside it.

It was glorious.

Outside: Texas summer, dust, mud, sweat and four-wheeler exhaust.
Inside the Vardo: refrigerated warehouse.

Victory.

Sunset did not end the adventure.

It merely changed the photography into something resembling recovered evidence from an unsolved forest incident.

The black-and-white night shots from this trip are some of my favorites precisely because they do not look polished.

They look strange.

They look slightly ridiculous.

They look like exactly what happened.

By night, the same little trailer that had carried everybody around during the day was still in service.

The woods changed when the light disappeared.

Camp lights became little islands in the dark.

Reflective patches jumped out in the camera.

The Vardo sat back at camp looking like some homemade expedition shelter that had accidentally wandered into surveillance footage.

And nobody was ready to stop yet.

Eventually the night moved away from engines and into the water.

Because apparently mudding all day in Texas is not enough chaos.

The kids went swimming after dark.

And through the weird monochrome night images, they look less like kids on a family ATV trip and more like mysterious creatures somebody accidentally photographed in a remote East Texas pond.

Perfect.

That weekend could have been told a completely different way.

We could focus on the flat tire.

The ramps flying off.

The late arrival.

The fact that our trailer looked like something somebody might have abandoned behind a barn twenty years ago.

The fact that other groups had dramatically more money tied up in their toys than we did.

All of that is true.

But none of it is really the story.

The story is that Stormeigh got her first mudding trip.

The girls spent a weekend in the woods.

Ma and Pa got dirty and laughed.

The CFMOTO did its job.

The ugly little trailer earned itself a chapter in family history.

The homemade Vardo kept everybody comfortable and, thanks to the new A/C, possibly preserved them for future archaeological study.

And a trip that almost began by losing two ramps somewhere along a rural highway somehow became exactly the kind of weekend we wanted.

That is what “punching up” has always meant to us.

It is not pretending that money does not matter.

Money matters.

Good equipment matters.

Sometimes the expensive solution really is better.

What we reject is the idea that you have to own the expensive solution before you are allowed to participate.

We have known people with beautiful equipment and almost no time to use it.

People with great jobs whose toys require the great jobs to make the payments on the toys they bought to enjoy the tiny amount of free time the great jobs leave them.

That path works for some people.

It was never going to be ours.

I may not always have a huge pile of money available.

But I have resources.

I can learn.

I can infer how something works.

Jackie and I can build things.

Repair things.

Repurpose things.

Call somebody.

Find something used.

Change the plan.

Try again.

And, perhaps most importantly, we can choose to spend our limited time actually doing something instead of sitting around waiting until conditions are perfect.

The conditions are never perfect.

Sometimes the tire is flat.

Sometimes your ramps are seven miles behind you.

Sometimes the route changes the day you leave.

Strap the ramps down.

Fix what you can.

And keep going.

That has become one of the unwritten rules of SETXMisFits.

Maybe it is not even unwritten anymore.

The kids know it.

Stormeigh got to see it firsthand.

You do not have to wait until your life looks like somebody else's before you start living it.

You do not need the expensive Jeep to join the Jeep people.

You do not need the massive RV to go camping.

You do not need two side-by-sides to take everybody into the woods.

Sometimes you resurrect the Geo Tracker.

Sometimes you build the Vardo.

Sometimes you hitch a beat-up utility trailer behind a four-wheeler and head down a dirt road.

Sometimes you sideload the whole damn experience.

And when something inevitably goes sideways?

Figure it out.

Because the old family motto still applies: