MEN'S ROOM: Happy campers

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Story & Illustrations by MARK WEBER

Mark Weber is a Wilmington-based artist and illustrates WILMA’s monthly Men’s Room essay. weberillustration.com

AA year ago, my wife and I purchased a truck

camper.

A truck camper sits in the bed of your pickup truck and is lowered and heightened by use of hydraulic stands, which is done by a battery-powered remote or by using a crank or hand drill with a bit. Easy peasy stuff. I am not fond of long-distance drives, but my wife, I believe, was a long-haul truck driver in her previous life. She thinks nothing of making a two-tothree-hour drive twice a day to return a desk or a pair of shoes. So, soon after purchasing our truck camper, which we named “Wanda,” she jumped on the planning of a cross-country trip. We left Wilmington on June 8 this summer and stayed on the road for nearly a month. Our final destination was Puget Sound’s Whidbey

Island, Washington – the great Pacific Northwest! I could bore you with tales of being bit by a dog two days into the trip or driving through a blinding dust storm in the Nevada desert or receiving bad

GPS directions and coming close to tumbling down a mountainside, but I hey, I’m an illustrator, not a writer, so I’ll just draw some of our adventures.