“…I cooked a simple dinner that night but still it didn’t sit right with her. I held her hair back as she puked it up. Now she was puking and I knew something was really wrong. I lay with her in bed and gently massaged her. I was worried being out here, but there was no better place to be. Our tent was a comfortable place as long as it was set on a level surface.”

The area around Oregon’s famous Tunnel Falls wasn’t such a bad place to have to take it slow.

“Learning how to backpack in Death Valley, we were not always comfortable and didn’t always sleep right. Once this became our home and our bed, eventually it was the most comfortable place in the world. That always seems to happen. My bed, whether it is a mattress, the foam pads in the truck, or the ground, is always the most comfortable spot in the world. This is one reason why it’s good to live with less. If you have a plush luxury bed in your mansion, then sleeping on the ground might not feel so good. However, if you sleep on the ground, with the vast canopy of the milky way as your drapery, nightingales and crickets singing you to sleep, then it feels like nirvana to sleep in a crummy forty dollar hotel bed occasionally. Although, we’d still rather sleep outside.”