Sometimes, re-entries to the road are hard.

This one was.

I’m still in shock about my mother’s death in April. It left me feeling sad, overwhelmed, fragile. “Unmoored,” one of my friends said. And she is right.

We are unmoored, literally and figuratively. We sold my mother’s home, our perch when off the road, and are truly homeless, something we used to joke about. Something we chose. Something we embrace.

When we hopped into The Epic Van a few weeks ago to roll down the road, I expected to rediscover my usual feeling of freedom, muted, of course, with a layer of sadness. Instead, I felt buried under an avalanche of grief, smothering my efforts to claw up to the sunshine.

My spirits were lifted by a visit in Alpine, Arizona, with Keven and Georges, two of our favorite people and camping buddies. Georges, an amazing chef, cooked us amazing meals, including some steaks I had been dreaming about since he last cooked them for us over a campfire in Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge near Arivaca, Arizona. Tom hiked with them, and we shared bourbon and stories with their neighbor, Brian.

But I couldn’t shake my angst. I worried about my son Nate’s difficult job search, about settling my mother’s estate, about health crises facing friends.

Nate, looking for jobs that would use his finance degree and experience, pounded his head against the brick wall of a faltering economy and stalled job market. It led to many sleepless nights for him and for me. We are grateful to report that he will soon start training at Wells Fargo on their small business team, a strong ray of sunshine peeking through that blanket of snow.

The duties of my mother’s estate aren’t onerous. But I strive to make sure I am honoring her wishes, being a good steward with her lifelong earnings, and doing what is best and right for my stepbrothers, my sister Nancy and me. And paperwork just sucks.

In the middle of all this, Jackie, my dear friend, travel companion, and second mother to Nate, was diagnosed with breast cancer and will need surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Our fellow Stanford fellow, David, with whom we have vacationed for the past 25 years, will soon undergo a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia. And I just heard another friend and former newspaper colleague, Laurie, is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, in preparation for surgery.

It brings back the PTSD of husband Tom’s cancer diagnosis, surgery and radiation, a year of hell. And I wish Jackie, David and Laurie strength for the hard work ahead of them to heal their bodies and souls. I take comfort in Tom’s cure and full life, his cancer now 20 years in the past, and wish the same for all of them.

The Epic Van seemed to be feeling this heavy weight and sprung a propane leak on our way to Albuquerque, prompting a late-night drive past elk wandering all over the road to a hotel for the night in Springerville, Arizona, the first time we’ve “checked in” in 10 years. Repairs in Albuquerque took four days, which, luckily, we spent visiting with Nate’s college roommate, Corbin, one of our “adopted” sons, his wife Acacia, working on her MD/PhD in Albuquerque and, bonus, Acacia’s mom, Anna, in town to look at a house she and husband Rob are buying.

Visits with Corbin and Acacia are always lovely, filled with good food, deep conversations, and reminders about living intentionally.

We left with working propane and our emotional batteries recharged.

But The Epic Van didn’t share our renewed energy, and we noticed her interior lights dimming. We stopped at O’Reilly’s, bought two new deep-cycle batteries for the “house” side and found someone deep in the hills of Colorado to install them.

Then my hip went wonky. All the bad juju seemed to settle on my sciatic nerve. And I’m limping around, unable to hike, in pain just sitting in my copilot seat in The Epic Van.

Because of all this dread, worry, breakage and lack of sleep, I’m calling a do-over. I’m calling tomorrow Day 1. I’ll write, I’ll read, I’ll knit a chemo hat for Jackie, I’ll celebrate Nate’s new job and his July birthday, and I’ll gather my strength and joy to send to all my friends in their battles.

P.S. David’s wife Judi, no longer with us, used to lovingly criticize me for the unstintingly sunny posts about our travels. “Write about the bad stuff,” she would exhort me. And I would swear that it was all nirvana. She would approve of this post.