On the first Friday of January, Wes stood at the kitchen window with his coffee and watched frost melt off the CR-V's windshield. "Nowhere to be," he said, like he was trying it out. That's January for us. It's the one month of the year we don't take a trip.
We made that part of the rule when we started a year ago, and I'm glad we did. December's trips are done, the holiday spending is still settling on the statements, and the weather out here can't decide between 34 degrees and 68. It's a good month to stay put, fill the trip account back up and plan the next twelve.
It also turned out to be a good month to rediscover what's close by. When you live near Maxton, people assume there's nothing to do. That's not entirely wrong, but it's not right either.
Free things close to home
Here's what fills our January weekends, almost all of it free:
- Lumber River State Park. There's an access area south of Lumberton with trails along the river, picnic shelters and no entrance fee. In January the river is dark and quiet and you can hear woodpeckers the whole way. Wes looks at the water and talks about where the catfish will be in May.
- The riverwalk in Lumberton. A short, easy walk by the river right in town. We pair it with whatever errand we needed to run in Lumberton anyway.
- Downtown Laurinburg. I grew up here. We walk Main Street, look in the antique shops without buying and stop by my mother's house, which always involves leftovers going home with us.
- The library. I check out travel books and state guides for the places on our list. Wes checks out westerns.
- Driving the back roads. Sometimes on a sunny Saturday we just take the CR-V out on the two-lane roads toward Red Springs or Laurel Hill, no destination, maybe ten dollars of gas. It keeps the battery happy, which after last month feels important.
That battery, by the way, died in a parking lot in Southern Pines the Saturday after Christmas. Wes installed the new one himself. If you want the whole story it's in an earlier post, but short version: it's the kind of thing that makes you glad January is a stay-home month.
A lot of soup
January is soup month. I make a big pot every Sunday: vegetable beef, chicken and rice, white bean with ham, and once a winter, Wes's favorite, a potato soup that I refuse to call healthy. One pot covers a couple of suppers and both of our lunches on Monday and Tuesday.
It's cheap, it's warm and it keeps us from eating out on the weekends we're home and a little bored. Boredom is what used to send us to a restaurant in Laurinburg on a Saturday night, $40 later. Now boredom sends us to the soup pot.
June approves of soup month too. She sits in the kitchen doorway the whole time the pot is going, in case anything falls. Something usually does.
Trip planning at the kitchen table
The main event of January is the planning. The paper road atlas comes out, along with the trip envelope from last year, which has gotten very thick.
Last year we took 12 trips, drove about 5,900 miles and spent $2,968 from the trip account. That doesn't count the Outer Banks cottage that got cancelled by a storm and was refunded, or the $57 trip policy that covered it. I'm going to write up the whole year in one post soon, so I won't do all of it here. But sitting at the table with those numbers is how we figure out what we want this year.
A few things we've settled on so far:
We want to try the Outer Banks again, properly this time, probably in August.
We want one big mountain trip in the fall.
We want a couple of very cheap trips, a one-nighter at a state park or a day trip, to balance out the bigger ones.
Valentine's weekend is already decided: my brother Darren's couch in Wilmington, which is free and comes with a brother.
I also got a small raise at work this month, and I've been thinking about what that does and doesn't change for the trip budget. I'll write that up when the numbers are final.
By the end of the month, the atlas has sticky notes on a dozen pages and the kitchen table has a pencil sketch of the year. Wes says January is the only month he gets to sleep in on a Saturday, and he's going to enjoy it. I'm going to sit here with the atlas and a bowl of soup and enjoy it in my own way.
